Views of Tense in English Grammar

Tense

1. Concerned with the sequencing of events in time and their relationship to speech time eg. past, present, future time relations

2. Traditionalist View

   • traditional, formal view of grammar from Latin model
   • 3 tenses in English
     • past
     • present
     • future
     • romance languages & Greek morphologically encode tense for each person in past, present & future (inflections)
   • In English...
     • past marked for all tenses (inflected) e.g. I walkED
     • present 3rd person singular inflected
     • future is not inflected -> modal 'will' and bare infinitive

3. Structuralist View

   • tense is form driven
     • 2 tenses: past - - present/ past - - non-past
       • past tense: he liked present tense: he likes
       • no future tense
         • he WILL like
           • refers to future time but is not true tense because there is no finite verb form and 'will' is a modal auxiliary
         • BERK (1999) "unlike Spanish or Greek, English has never had a future tense"

4. Functionalist View

   • tense is meaning driven - need to distinguish between:
     • TENSE: relates to lexical marking of the 'finite verb' - language specific and structural / functional
     • TIME RELATIONS: cross-linguistic concept - relative timeframes
       • Chinese & Burmese have no tense system at all; time relations are represented in terms of temporal adverbs
   • Time Relations
     • Future tense commonly expressed by any of:
       • He's leaving for France next week
       • He's going to leave for France next week
       • He will leave for France next week
       • He leaves for France next week
     • Therefore, in English: no one-to-one relationship between tense and time relation

5. Tense and Time Relations

   • Traditionalist View
     • 3 tenses: past, present and future
     • tense = grammatical category that relates the moment on the timeline in which the event happened
       • not possible in English
   • Structuralist View
     • 2 tenses: past and present (past and non-past)
     • grammatical tense (inflection) only for PAST AND PRESENT in Engish
   • Functionalist View
     • 2 structural tenses
     • Huddleston (1988)
       • "tense is a grammatical category with time relations as its semantic basis"