607: Future Tense Aug 6, 2016

English has no future tense marker, or any other way to (morphologically) alter the form of a verb, opposite to the conjugation in Latin, French, and many other languages. To get around this, English speakers use a range of different constructions. Most often the usage of 'will' or 'shall' would be called the "future tense", but it is not that simple. Generally, there are 6 ways of expressing future-action. The first, like mentioned is with 'will' or 'shall' and a verb in base-form. The next is with "be going to" and a corresponding infinitive verb. Another way is to use phrases such as "be to"," be about to", "have to" etc. In addition to that, the present progressive can be used to emphasize future planned events, but usually only for the near future. Also the simple present tense can be employed for this purpose but more definitely, for example: "he is going to bed at 11pm" versus "he goes to bed at 11pm". Finally, other modal verbs, including 'may' 'might' 'could' and 'should' can convey future time, even though they can also be used to convey past time in different contexts.