There is no future tense in English
Tenses, tenses, tenses. It seems like English has loads of them.
The present continuous tense. The future perfect tense. The preterite. The past perfect progressive tense.
Depending on what English school you went to, or what you found on google, you might believe that are 5, 7, 12, or even more tenses to learn.
But let me share a dirty little secret with you ... there are only two tenses in English.
And the future tense isn't one of them.
In order to understand why there's no future tense in English, the first thing we need to do is separate the idea of tense from the idea of time.
You see, all languages can talk about time but not all languages use tense.
Some languages like Mandarin and Burmese are tenseless. In these tenseless languages, to indicate when something happened or will happen, you just include some kind of time marker.
If English was a tenseless language, it might look something like this ...
I go home yesterday.
I go home today.
I go home tomorrow.
The main phrase "I go home" would stay the same and we'd indicate time with an adverb like today, last week, or next year.
The next thing we need to do is distinguish the idea of grammatical features of a language from lexical ones.
Something is a grammatical feature if it performs a particular function within a language. Being grammatical is all about what job a word or feature is doing.
A lexical feature by contrast, is one determined by its content.
Just look at these two sentences ...
I am running.
I am swimming.
Both sentences are grammatically identical. They both follow the pattern "I am VERBing".
Running and swimming are doing the same job. They perform the same grammatical function in the sentences.
But unless you're a fish, running and swimming are not the same action. The meaning of the words is different.
So "I am running" and "I am swimming" are grammatically the same but lexically different.
The change in meaning comes not from the structure or pattern of the sentence but from the content of the words.
Now for a third distinction. Linguists generally recognise two ways of changing the meaning of words in any language - with inflection (by changing words) or with periphrasis (by adding words).
Periphras-what?
Take the word funny. We can change the word to change the meaning.
Funny -> funnier -> funniest. That's inflection.
But we can also change the meaning by adding extra words instead. Funny -> more funny -> most funny. That's periphrasis.
Different changes, same meaning.
(Remembering these terms isn't important but knowing the difference is)
So with these three distinction in mind, tense vs time, grammatical vs lexical, and inflection vs periphrasis, we can start to understand why English doesn't have a future tense.
That's because tense is the grammatical expression of time.
To be a distinct tense in any language, the change in a sentence (by changing or adding words), needs to be grammatical not lexical.
So "I am shopping today" and "I am shopping tomorrow" don't express a different tense because the difference is lexical.
They express different times but they use the same tense - the non-past.
But "I am shopping" and "I was shopping" do express different tenses (as well as different times).
Was doesn't mean yesterday or last week, it is simply the past tense of am. The change is grammatical.
So it's clear that we have a past tense and a non-past tense. "I swam" vs "I swim". "I was swimming" vs "I am swimming".
But how do we express future events and do we have a future tense?
Well, expressing the future is easy. "I will swim" and "I will be swimming".
Whether or not this is the future tense is a different matter all together.
Husband implies man but man doesn't imply husband.
Just because it is possible to use both inflection (changing words) and periphrasis (adding words) to indicate tense in languages, it doesn't mean the presence of these features indicates an actual change in tense.
When we use inflection to change the word funny to funniest, we don't change the tense.
And when we use periphrasis to change the phrase "I swim" to "I am swimming", we aren't changing the tense either. Rather, we are adding the continuous or progressive aspect to indicate that the action is happening right now.
And the same thing is happening with the auxiliary verb will.
"I will swim" might be talking about the future but it is not the future tense. That's because will changes the mood of the sentence, not the tense.
Mood is just the grammatical expression of modality. It indicates the speakers belief about what they are saying.
Mood allows us to express ability - "I can swim"; possibility - "I might swim"; obligation - "I must swim"; aspiration - "Were I to swim"; and prediction - "I will swim".
So the construction "I will swim" is actually using the non-past tense to make a prediction about an action.
Now most of the time, our predictions are about the future. That's why we use "I will X" to talk about future events.
But we can also make predictions about the present in the same way.
Where's Dave? He's late.
Dave? He will be asleep right now.
Non-past tense, predictive mood.
When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense.
We don't have the same knowledge of things in the future that we have do of things in the present or past.
When we say the sun will rise tomorrow, we don't actually know this yet. So we have to make a prediction and hope that it is true.
And it's the same when we are talking about things in the present that we aren't 100% sure about. We make predictions with will.
So there you have it. Because we don't have a future tense in English, we use will to make predictions and show that we are almost certain about what we are saying.
There are only two tenses in English and the future isn't one of them.
