Philosophers have long been concerned with the issue of whether or not the notions of truth and falsity apply to future contingents, that is, to statements that express future events that have not been determined yet and thus may not happen. There are several frameworks that (arguably) provide a satisfactory account of the truth conditions of future tensed sentences, but there have been few accounts of the assertability conditions for such statements. The question therefore remains: under which conditions should one assert that some event will happen, if the universe is indeterministic and its current state leaves it open whether the event at stake will indeed happen. The chapter first explains the problem that future contingents raise for natural language semantics and introduces four frameworks that rely upon the idea of “branching time”. These frameworks are compared and evaluated in the second section. The final section discusses a puzzle that turns upon the assertability of future-tensed sentences.
Beginning with three descriptive case studies from Turkish, Basque, and the Papuan language Iatmul, the chapter identifys structural means to express future time reference in these languages, and the morphosyntactic characteristics, polysemy, and, diachrony of the relevant morphemes and constructions are described. Markers often glossed as ‘future’ are more appropriately labelled ‘prospective’ or ‘irrealis’, while the distinction between prospective aspect and future tense also depends on the extent to which a prospective construction is grammaticalized. While a present prospective can develop into a future, past prospectives tend to take over the function of counterfactual conditionals in the past. Aspect, tense, and mood should therefore be defined as prototype categories within the macro-category ‘situation perspective’. Diachronic shift and synchronic overlap between the micro-categories are a consequence of their being connected by grammaticalization scales. All TAM marking contributes to the situation perspective; while aspect is the closest perspective, epistemic modality is the most distant.
This chapter lays bare some of the difficulties and intricacies that often remain implicit in the literature on future tense(s). After outlining some foundational issues concerning the definition of ‘tense’ as distinct from ‘aspect’ and ‘modality’, this chapter examines criteria for deciding if a given language has a future tense. More fundamentally, the chapter considers whether there is justification for the very category of ‘future tense’ as part of the linguist’s descriptive repertoire. To achieve these goals, the chapter reviews some of the relevant literature from such fields as traditional linguistics, formal semantics, and the philosophy of language and also assesses to what extent work in cognitive psychology confirms that referring to future time is in essence different from referring to the past. The chapter concludes by explaining why a book such as Future Times, Future Tenses is timely, and by sketching all the contributions to the volume.
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