Many of us might find it strange that despite the overwhelming richness and diversity of the English language, its verbs can’t inflect or change in form for the future tense. By some quirk in the development of its grammar structures, English 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 denoting the future. It does the job 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.
IMAGE CREDIT: WWW.IELTSFEVER.COM Here now are the six ways that English evokes the future:
(1) The simple future tense, which puts the auxiliary verb “will” ahead of the verb stem, as in “will take” in “The chairman
will take his retirement next month,” and
(2) 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 taken” in “By this time next month, the chairman
will have taken his retirement.”
In both cases, instead of inflecting, the verb “take” takes the expedient of harnessing one verb (“will”) or two auxiliary verbs (“will have”), respectively, to make its two visions of the future work.
On top of these two forms, English came up with four more grammatical stratagems to evoke the future tense, as follows:
(3) The arranged future, also known as
the present continuous;
(4) The predicted future;
(5) The timetable future, also known as
the present simple; and
(6) The described futures, also known as
the future continuous.
The future-tense type that’s often confusing—the form “be going to + the verb’s base form”—is Form #4 above, the predicted future. As in the sentence “I
am going to forget about you someday,” for example, this form of the future tense uses the verb’s infinitive form preceded by the auxiliary phrase “going to.” It serves as a categorical forecast of what will happen based on what the speaker knows about the evolving present. (A common alternative to this is the sentence “I
am gonna forget about you someday,” where “gonna” colloquially contracts of “going to.”)
So how does the predicted future form differ from this simple future form using “will forget”: “I
will forget about you someday”?
The difference is that the simple-future form using “will” simply states that something will happen in the future, while the predicted-future form using “going to” categorically declares that the speaker will make a purposive effort to make the stated future outcome happen.
There are two further uses of the “going to” future-tense form:
(1) To express what people want to do, as in “
I’m going to think over your suggestion.” This form of the purposive future suggests that the speaker had thought about the action before speaking about it, as opposed to deciding on it spontaneously, in which case the simple future tense using “will” is more appropriate: “I
will think over your suggestion.”
(2) To express something that the speaker believes is impossible to avoid or prevent: “You know that the circus
is going to close this Friday.”
Statements in the predicted future form are shaped both by the information the speaker has about that future and how he or she wants that future to be. They can use a temporal indicator—“someday” for example—but they don’t necessarily require it, as in “
I am going to forget about you.”
When precise time frames are provided, the simple future tense that uses “will” is often preferable: “
I will forget about you someday.”
(Next:
How English deals with the past imperfect tense) September 19, 2019
This essay, 1,160th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the September 12, 2019 print edition of The Manila Times
, © 2019 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
