Jose Carillo's Forum

ESSAYS BY JOSE CARILLO

On this webpage, Jose A. Carillo shares with English users, learners, and teachers a representative selection of his essays on the English language, particularly on its uses and misuses. One essay will be featured every week, and previously featured essays will be archived in the forum.

The six ways that English reckons with the future

Many of us might find it strange that despite the overwhelming richness and diversity of English as a language, its verbs can’t inflect or change in form for the future tense. By some quirk in the development of the English grammar structures, its verbs can inflect only for the past, present, and perfect tenses. To compensate for this grammatical handicap, however, English came up with no less than six ways of reckoning with the future. These six forms evoke the future by appending to the main verb particular combinations of auxiliary verbs in different tenses, and the choice among these future-tense forms primarily depends on which part of the future is important to us or to those telling us about it. This obviously makes it manyfold more complicated for learners to master the English future tense.

To clarify the differences between these six future-tense forms, I wrote an essay on the subject for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2004. That essay subsequently became the introduction to Section 7 – “Mastering the English Tenses” of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, which devotes nine chapters to an intensive discussion of the various future-tense forms and the adverbs of time. I am now posting that essay here for the benefit of Forum members and guests who’d like to make themselves much more precise and expressive in evoking the future in their written and spoken English. (November 5, 2011)

Click on the title below to read the essay.

Though very rich and diverse, English can’t inflect for the future tense

Despite the overwhelming richness of the English language, its verbs have the handicap of not being able to morph by themselves into the future tense. As we all know, they inflect only for the past, present, and perfect tenses. For instance, “give” turns to “gave” in the past tense, “gives” in the present tense, and “given” in the perfect tense; in most cases, in fact, English verbs inflect themselves for the perfect tense in the same way as they do for the past tense, as in “wanted” for both the past and perfect tenses of “want.” Yet when they turn to the future, all of the English verbs can’t do anything to themselves; they simply don’t have the ability to inflect for it.

English verbs never got to internally work out an inflection for the future tense, unlike, say, Tagalog with its future-tense “pupunta” (“will go”) for the infinitive “pagpunta” (“to go”). It’s as if the Angles (the ancient forebears of the English people), too preoccupied perhaps with settling in what is now England after crossing the channel from the European mainland, never found the need or the time to work out the future tense into their verbs.

To compensate for this structural oversight in its verb-building efforts, however, the English language came up with no less than six ways of reckoning with the future. The first two, of course, we already know by heart. They are the simple future tense, which puts the auxiliary verb “will” ahead of the verb stem, as in “will give,” and the future perfect tense, which uses the so-called temporal indicators to situate actions and events in various times in the future, as in the use of the future perfect “will have given” in the following sentence: “By this time tomorrow, she will have given me her answer to my marriage proposal.” In both cases, instead of inflecting itself, the verb “give” took the expedient of harnessing one and two auxiliary verbs, respectively, to make its two visions of the future work.

English then dealt with the future tense even more purposively by coming up with four more grammatical stratagems to express it, in the process making its future tense more complicated than that of some other languages with elaborate future-tense inflections built into their verbs. These future-tense forms and the grammatical structures English developed for them are as follows: the arranged future, also known as the present continuous; the predicted future; the timetable future, also known as the present simple; and the described futures, also known as the future continuous.

All of these forms evoke the future by appending to the main verb particular combinations of auxiliary verbs in different tenses. The choice among these forms depends on which part of the future is important to us or to those telling us about it, and their semantic value lies in the fact that they enable us to make fine distinctions as to whether what will happen is a regular event; as to whether something is unavoidable or prearranged or something we or other people want or wish to happen; as to how long the wait will be until something happens; and as to the degree of certainty that something will happen.

We all know that the future is extremely flexible; in contrast, there’s really nothing we can do to change the past and there’s not really much we can do to alter the evolving present. Unless we are a dyed-in-the-wool believers in determinism and predetermination—both aver that all acts of will or natural occurrences are causally predetermined by preceding events, natural laws, or the divine—we will find many occasions to use the arranged future in our spoken or written prose. The uniquely human ability to plan and shape future events comes into play here.

The arranged future or present continuous means that we have decided what to do but have not yet executed that decision: “We are doing overtime work this coming weekend; client wants the marketing plan first thing on Monday.” “The charming rogue begged on bended knees so I’m pardoning him next month for that act of humility.” “She is leaving with me for my scheduled sabbatical in Rome; all the bookings have already been arranged.”

Note that the arranged future uses the present-tense form of the auxiliary “to be” in tandem with the present participle (“-ing” form) of the verb: “are doing,” “am pardoning,” and “is leaving.” This is the so-called continuous future, which indicates that the future action started when the decision was made and will continue until the moment that the action is finished. To make sure that it doesn’t wrongly convey the idea that the future is happening right now, the arranged future must often use clear temporal indicators, like “this coming weekend,” “next month,” and “my scheduled sabbatical in Rome” in the sentences given as examples in the preceding paragraph.

---------------
From the book Give Your English the Winning Edge by Jose A. Carillo © 2009 by the author, © 2010 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Click here to discuss/comment


Previously Featured Essay:

The proper way to form compound subjects with nouns and pronouns

A very common pronoun misuse problem occurs when a personal pronoun is joined with a noun or another pronoun by the conjunction “and” or “or” to form a compound subject. Many people, particularly in colloquial speech, tend to use the objective form of the personal pronoun in such constructions: “The president and him are now politically estranged.” “Both the competition and us will suffer because of this trade mess.” “Alicia and me have been close friends since kindergarten.” “You or me need to stay behind.”

No matter how correct-sounding they may seem, such constructions are grammatically incorrect and are likely to incur disapproval from English teachers and discerning employers. The grammar rule to remember here is to always use the subjective or nominative form of the personal pronoun: “The president and he are now politically estranged.” “Both the competition and we will suffer because of this trade mess.” “Alicia and I have been close friends since kindergarten.” “You or I need to stay behind.”

When the personal pronoun is the last element in the compound subject, people will have a stronger tendency to wrongly use its objective form. This is because the construction obscures the grammatical error and makes it sound aboveboard, as in this example given earlier: “The president and him are now politically estranged.” A good preemptive stylistic habit is to make the personal pronoun the first element instead: “He and the president are now politically estranged.” “Both we and the competition will suffer because of this trade mess.” This way, it becomes unmistakably clear that the personal pronoun should be in the subjective form.

In the spirit of modesty, however, we should always make the personal pronoun “I” an exception to this prescription. As we learned early in English grammar, it is good form to make “I” always the last element of the compound subject: “Alicia and I have been close friends since kindergarten.” “You or I need to stay behind.” (It sounds self-serving to use “I” ahead: “I and Alicia have been close friends since kindergarten.” “I or you need to stay behind.”

We’ll look into just three more contentious case usage problems before we close:

(1) Many people will catch themselves saying “This is just between you and I,” “According to you and they, the money was lost in transit,” and “Hardworking people like you and I need a break sometimes.” Some will invoke that even Shakespeare also had done so during his time, but the fact is that a grammar rule outlawing such usage became the English standard in the 1860s onwards. In your formal writing, therefore, you’ll always be grammatically in the right by using the objective form of the personal pronoun instead: “This is just between you and me.” “According to you and them, the money was lost in transit,” and “Hardworking people like you and me need a break sometimes.”

(2) You still can get into a heated grammar debate on whether to say “No one but I saw that controversial movie” or “No one but me saw that controversial movie,” or to say “No one except I came for the meeting” or “No one except me came for the meeting.” But in such constructions, good grammar will be on your side when you use the objective form of the personal pronoun: “No one but me saw that controversial movie.” “No one except me came for the meeting.”

(3) When using personal pronouns after forms of the verb “be,” do we say “That must be her on the escalator” (objective “her”) or “That must be she on the escalator” (nominative “she”)? Using the objective case may sound more natural than the nominative case, but you’re well advised to limit it to conversational use. Although the nominative case may sound pedantic, it is the grammatically acceptable choice in formal writing: “That must be she on the escalator.” (October 20, 2007)
--------------
From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, October 20, 2007 © 2007 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
--------------
*When combining pronouns with nouns, it’s very important to remember that it’s not only pronouns that have case. As we learn early in English grammar, pronouns in general inflect or change form in the nominative or subjective case, objective case, and possessive. Nouns also have case like pronouns, but the big difference between them is that nouns remain in the same form—they don’t  inflect at all—in the subjective, nominative, and objective cases. Only in the possessive case do nouns inflect by adding the apostrophe-s at their tail ends; for example, “That laptop is Alicia’s.”

So, when forming a compound subject with a noun and pronoun, keep in mind that they should both be in the same case, except that the noun doesn’t inflect at all and remains as is except in the possessive form. When compounding a pronoun and another pronoun, of course, we must make sure that both are in the same case, based on their correct inflected forms for that case.

For a comprehensive review of case usage and the English Pronoun Chart, click this link to “Lesson #3 – The Matter of Case in English” in the Forum.

Click here to discuss/comment


Click to read more essays (requires registration to post)




Copyright © 2010 by Aperture Web Development. All rights reserved.

Page best viewed with:

Mozilla FirefoxGoogle Chrome

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional

Page last modified: 6 November, 2011, 2:15 p.m.