Future tense vs. future time: An introduction

Abstract

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.

Distance, evidentiality and counter-argumentation: Concessive future in Spanish

“…Time has traditionally been represented as a straight line with the present as its zero point or reference point; past would be placed on the left and future on the right (Comrie, 1985: 2). However, a certain imbalance has been assumed from Aristotle onwards between past and present, on the one hand, and future, on the other, which has led to conceive the latter as a branch structure (Dahl, 1985;Jaszczolt, 2009;De Brabanter, Kissine and Sharifzadeh, 2014). In fact, contrary to past and present, future can be neither perceived nor remembered.…”

“…A higher complexity of future, as opposed to present and past, would thus be expected; however, the data treated byDe Brabanter et al (2014) from the point of view of neurolinguistics turn out to be revealing in this respect: speakers suffering from aphasia do not find more difficulty in conceiving future than in conceiving past.…”