How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tenses

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Salmoneus »

linguoboy wrote:
Travis B. wrote:But even will and be going to are not exactly interchangeable; will feels more like a pure future tense whereas be going to implies a prospective aspect at times. However, be going to very frequently is used with a purely future meaning as well.
Will often has an element of volition which is different than what I associate with a "pure future". Consider this: You're in a meeting and someone asks, "Who's taking minutes?" Now consider the possible replies:

"I will."
and
"I'm going to."

Of the two, "I'm going to" feels more like a "pure future". (In fact, it feels so purely future, it doesn't even sound to me like the person necessarily intends to take minutes at that meeting.)
For me, "I'm going to" isn't a grammatical answer to that question - it's more neutral, but it also isn't permissable as the answer to an 'is' question. The alternative are "I will," "I shall," and "I am".
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Salmoneus »

KathTheDragon wrote:For me, "going to" rather has the sense of immediacy, with "will" being rather unmarked. "shall" then has a sense of intent.
I don't get immediacy from "going to". For instance, I've no problem with "I'm going to be spending Christmas 2043 in jail!", or "I'm going to be your line manager when I come back from maternity leave, but for now you'll be answering to Mike," or "I'm going to live longer than my uncle did."

For immediacy, there's "about to", but that's more a prospective than a posterior ("I was about to, but didn't").

Possibly one issue with "going to" is that it may conflate two different things: a prospective that strongly implies volition and immediacy ("I was going to call you!") and a genuine future (or even posterior ("they didn't know it, but they were going to have the worst week of their lives")), which can be fairly neutral. I think present-tense tokens in particular can be examples of either one ("I'm going to call him") or the other ("I'm going to be over this fired, aren't I?") and it's not always clear which.

[note that the prospective can probably be used in the future, while I don't think the future can. So ?"I bet I'll just be going to call him when he rings", but ??"I'll be going to be fired over it". The prospective in "about", meanwhile, is fully compatible with the future: "I'll be about to call him", "I'll be about to be fired".]



Regarding will/shall, I still have the traditional will/shall inversion, but this mostly seems to be lost among modern speakers even in the UK.
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Axiem »

There's also "fixin' to" as a more casual "immediate future", with some implication of "I'm in the process of getting ready to". While it's probably borrowed from AAVE, I've heard non-AAVE speakers use it a fair amount.

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Travis B. »

Axiem wrote:There's also "fixin' to" as a more casual "immediate future", with some implication of "I'm in the process of getting ready to". While it's probably borrowed from AAVE, I've heard non-AAVE speakers use it a fair amount.
I think that is what we call a prospective aspect.
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by gmalivuk »

I don't know the technical terms, but in ESL the standard explanation for the difference between "will" and "going to" for voluntary actions is that "will" is for decisions made at the time of speaking (and offers andppromises made at the time of speaking) while "going to" indicates a prior intention or plan.

For general predictions they are often interchangeable, but if there's immediate evidence that something is about to happen, only "going to" works.

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Ziz »

gmalivuk wrote:I don't know the technical terms, but in ESL the standard explanation for the difference between "will" and "going to" for voluntary actions is that "will" is for decisions made at the time of speaking (and offers andppromises made at the time of speaking) while "going to" indicates a prior intention or plan.

For general predictions they are often interchangeable, but if there's immediate evidence that something is about to happen, only "going to" works.
For me, "going to" doesn't necessarily indicate planning, because you can say, "An asteroid is going to collide with Earth in 40 years."

For prior intention or plan, or really anything foreordained, I teach the present progressive with some adverbial time phrase: "I'm meeting some friends tonight for a beer." or "The weatherman says it's raining tomorrow."

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by gmalivuk »

What asteroids are going to do is a prediction, which as I said can also be expressed with "going to".

But for voluntary decisions about future actions, I can't think of any examples where "going to" doesn't indicate an already-made decision.

"I'm going to help you move" means I already decided that, while "I'll help you move" means I'm making the decision (or at least the offer) now for the first time. "I'm meeting with him tomorrow" carries the additional implication that I've arranged that meeting with him, while "I'm going to meet with him tomorrow" might mean that I've made the decision myself but haven't scheduled it with him yet.

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Travis B. »

The thing about this is that this feels like a rule of thumb some ESL people came up with rather than an actual synchronic grammatical rule. It kind of works when will is stressed, but it otherwise does not seem so hard and fast, as with all these things.
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by zompist »

gmalivuk wrote:But for voluntary decisions about future actions, I can't think of any examples where "going to" doesn't indicate an already-made decision.
This is the sort of thing that's very easy to check with Google. Gooling "I'm going to" gives examples like these, none of which indicates a decision:

I feel like I'm gonna lose you
Why I'm going to miss Devin Nunes
Things I'm going to miss the most
I'm going to cry
I think I'm going to freeze to death!
I'm going to get cancer
I'm going to be blamed for everything
I'm going to be out of town for awhile
I believe I'm going to be the No. 1 pick

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Salmoneus »

zompist wrote:
gmalivuk wrote:But for voluntary decisions about future actions, I can't think of any examples where "going to" doesn't indicate an already-made decision.
This is the sort of thing that's very easy to check with Google. Gooling "I'm going to" gives examples like these, none of which indicates a decision:

I feel like I'm gonna lose you
Why I'm going to miss Devin Nunes
Things I'm going to miss the most
I'm going to cry
I think I'm going to freeze to death!
I'm going to get cancer
I'm going to be blamed for everything
I'm going to be out of town for awhile
I believe I'm going to be the No. 1 pick
But twice now he's specified only voluntary actions, and those aren't voluntary, so they're not relevent to his theory. [not that I'm convinced by the theory, mind]
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by gmalivuk »

zompist wrote:
gmalivuk wrote:But for voluntary decisions about future actions, I can't think of any examples where "going to" doesn't indicate an already-made decision.
This is the sort of thing that's very easy to check with Google. Gooling "I'm going to" gives examples like these, none of which indicates a decision:
So perhaps "going to" is used more often overall for predictions than plans.

But for voluntary decisions about future actions, I can't think of any examples where "going to" doesn't indicate an already-made decision. I'm already limiting the statement to be about "going to" for decisions, so examples of "going to" for non-decisions are rather beside the point.

I'm perfectly willing to accept that this is a good-enough-for-ESL pattern rather than a general rule, as my original point was simply that this is the standard explanation in teaching, but I still can't think of any examples where "going to" doesn't indicate an already-made decision when it is referring to a voluntary decision about a future action.

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by zompist »

OK, then among decisions, you think it's an already-made decision rather than a spur of the moment one? This is harder to check for, since people don't always record when they made the decision :), but consider...

"I'm going to have to charge you extra."
"The dog got out again. I'm going to have to build a fence or something."
"Are you gonna eat that?"
"Want some more?" "I'm gonna pass."
"I'm going to tell Mom!"

These are all possible if the decision was made just as the person spoke.

Contrariwise, you can easily use "will" for decisions made well into the past:

"When he comes back, I'll hit him in the head."
"I'll never marry a smoker."
"I'll take British History next fall."
"I'll do whatever it takes."

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by gmalivuk »

I'm not sure you can decide to have to do something, and "Are you gonna eat that" sounds an awful lot like "Are you planning to eat that". "I'm gonna pass" and "I'm going to tell Mom" are probably real counterexamples, though.

As for "will", I'm not sure any of those are definitely prior decisions, though refusals are another category where we can use "will" regardless of when the decision was made. The one that maybe looks most plan-like, "I'll take British History next fall," still sounds to me like what someone says as they're working through their class schedule rather than what they say after they've settled it.

So yes, the reality is messier and more complex than the convenient rule of thumb would suggest, but I still think the rule of thumb is more robust than y'all are giving it credit for.

Edit: oh, and on the original topic of this thread, I sometimes teach that there are *twelve* tenses in English, because at lower levels it's not terribly useful to push the tense/aspect distinction.

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Salmoneus »

gmalivuk wrote:I'm not sure you can decide to have to do something, and "Are you gonna eat that" sounds an awful lot like "Are you planning to eat that". "I'm gonna pass" and "I'm going to tell Mom" are probably real counterexamples, though.
I agree, and "I'm going to tell Mum" doesn't sound natural to me, unless it's revealing an existing plan. If it's the sort of thing shouted out on the spur of the moment, I'd go with "I'll tell Mum!" or "I'm telling Mum!".

Another counterexample for me would be where you tell someone something catastrophic and they calmingly reply "OK, here's what we're going to do..."

However, this may be misleading - since the implication of prior decision may well be intentional there, even if it's false (i.e. sounding like you've got a plan is a way to reassure someone, even if they know you don't). Likewise, situations where the invocation of a plan may be used to strengthen a claimed future action - a drunk guy shouting "I'm going to fuck you up!", for instance, or a someone singing "we're going to rock around the clock tonight" or "sun machine is coming down and we're going to have a party". While there may be no actual pre-existing plan referred to in these instances, they do strive for a particular effect, and an implication of "no honestly this isn't just something I'm saying off the top of my head on a whim and that I might change in a moment!" may help in that regard.

And similarly "I'm gonna pass" feels a bit 'odd', too... jocular, slangy (I don't think I'd say it), even notated differently ('gonna' vs 'going to'). So it seems like a good rule of thumb to me. I also connects to the idea of a prospective element.

I'm not so convinced in the other direction, though. Just because "going to" is used in one way, doesn't mean "will" is used in the opposite way. I think it's easier to find counterexamples for "will", so rather than a binary choice I'd see "will" as the default and "going to" being a particular alternative. For instance, I could say both "I will do whatever it takes" and "I'm going to do whatever it takes", but to me the latter is more forceful, emphasising that this is a settled decision I have made that you can't do anything about. The former CAN be used with that meaning, but it can also reflect a spur-of-the-moment decision. So I think the 'going to' construction intentionally emphasises the decidedness.

Although then again, the counterexamples generally work better with "'ll" than with "will" - and both synchronically and diachronically it's not clear that that's actually the same word.

I'd also suggest two alternative interpretations of "going to": it may indicate a plan, or it may indicate a degree of fixity (that is, something that won't easily be changed), which would connect it to its use in predictions. Can we think of ways to distinguish the "prior decision" interpretation from the "plan" or "relatively fixed course" interpretations?

It's also worth noting that in many of these cases the bare present is also an option. "I'm telling Mum", "I'm passing (on that)", "I'm having a party", "are you eating that?", "I'm taking British History". This doesn't work, however, for "going to have to" ("I'm having to build a fence" isn't a future), and it doesn't for some reason work so well for "I'm fucking you up!", although it is just about possible with adverbs ("I'm SO fucking you up!", "If I catch you, I'm fucking you up!").



...I think this may be complicated.
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by gmalivuk »

Below is the typical sequence I use when presenting this in class. It is in order of planned-ness or fixity, and I usually tell students that "going to" can work for the situations below it, but that we tend to go with the shortest expression that gives the correct information. I also leave out that "will" can sometimes be so used as well, because goal with learners is generally to discourage "will", as they often want to use it for everything when in fact native speakers are much more likely to use "going to" or the present progressive for simple sentences about future plans.

I'll meet with him tomorrow. = I've just realized I'm out of time today, so it's necessary to postpone the meeting until tomorrow.
I'm going to meet with him tomorrow. = I decided this a little while ago, though perhaps I haven't yet arranged the meeting with him.
I'm meeting with him tomorrow. = I've arranged the meeting with him. (I usually explain present progressive as being for planned future actions with some arrangements, at least when arrangements are possible.)
I meet with him tomorrow. = This meeting is written on my schedule (and perhaps has been for some time).

(My intuition is that fixity and prior decisions aren't so much separate interpretations as they are a more general and a more specific description of the same pattern. We use "going to" when we've already got a plan in mind because the existence of that prior plan makes the action more fixed than it would be if I were just now deciding.)

An additional twist is the fact that we seem more willing to use "will" when there's a time clause or a conditional clause, regardless of when a decision was made. "I'll cook dinner when you get home" or "I'll bring an umbrella if it's raining" sound fine even if those are both decisions I made in the past (though again we can emphasize the priorness of the plan with "going to" or the present progressive for those main clauses).
Salmoneus wrote:the implication of prior decision may well be intentional there, even if it's false
Yeah, it can be surprisingly difficult to get across the fact that sometimes we use language to lie. I may use "going to" to suggest that I already have a plan (or "will" to suggest that I haven't already thought about this) even if that isn't really the case.

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by zompist »

The situations where we talk about the future are complex. I don't think a good case has been made that the constructions are.

I think the constructions are much simpler: they vary largely by register. "Going to" is more colloquial, as are abbreviations. So there's a staircase of formality something like

I'm gonna clean this house.
I'm going to clean this house.
I'll clean this house.
I will clean this house.

Now, register is complicated enough! Some situations are clear: a lawyer would probably not use "going to" in a contract; a two-year-old will not declare "I will not eat that." But even in a formal situation, using more colloquial language can come across as forceful and thus have a pragmatic effect; while even talking to ourselves at home, we might instinctively avoid "gonna". Since firmness of intent is always valuable, simply talking differently than you normally do— in either direction— might have a communicative purpose. And if you are teaching foreigners, you certainly do not want to simply communicate that more formal is always better.

(The abbreviations are tied up wth our over-consciousness of writing. Most of us are used to saying "gonna" and writing "going to", to the extent that we may not be reliable witnesses about what we actually say out loud.)

And yes, we can use the present tense to talk about the future too. And the past! "If you stopped smoking, you'd be healthier."

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by gmalivuk »

Register is another way the constructions vary, yes, but I strongly disagree with your implication that most of the difference in meaning comes from differences in register.

If nothing else, you'd need to explain how those register differences correspond to differences in fixity.

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Travis B. »

I am inclined to agree, e.g. with those examples I would order them like:

I'm[ʌ̃ː] clean this house.
I'm gonna clean this house.
[aːɤ] clean this house.
I'm going to clean this house
[aːejɯ̞ː] clean this house.
I am going to clean this house
I will clean this house.

Clearly there are two dimensions here, will versus be going to, orthogonal to register. And while I do not agree with gmalivuk's conclusions, there clearly is a distinction, e.g. that will implies volitionality while be going to often serves as a prospective aspect (but of course it is not that simple either).
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Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by zompist »

gmalivuk wrote:If nothing else, you'd need to explain how those register differences correspond to differences in fixity.
Well, I don't need to, because I've already said I don't think that's the difference, and provided examples why.

I really think you're not going to get farther by introspection. I'd advise doing (quite a bit of) Googling to collect a lot of examples and see how the constructions really are used.

But, I've already given you an out! I agree that fixity of purpose is something humans really like to communicate. Which immediately means:
* people will seize upon a new construction that emphasizes fixity of purpose
* people will water down old constructions (because people will express far more fixedness than they really mean), so that strongly lexical future tenses eventually just end up communicating futurity

So, as I said, any divergence from your normal way of speaking can denote fixity. If the ambassador says "We will resist this incursion into our territory", they're using stress and formality to underline their seriousness. Yet they could also use a highly colloquial usage-- "We're gonna push these interlopers out"-- precisely because a more colloquial expression adds rhetorical punch and thus underlines their seriousness. This is harder to explain if you insist on defining relative fixity as part of the meaning of the construction.

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Salmoneus »

zompist wrote:The situations where we talk about the future are complex. I don't think a good case has been made that the constructions are.

I think the constructions are much simpler: they vary largely by register. "Going to" is more colloquial, as are abbreviations. So there's a staircase of formality something like

I'm gonna clean this house.
I'm going to clean this house.
I'll clean this house.
I will clean this house.

Now, register is complicated enough! Some situations are clear: a lawyer would probably not use "going to" in a contract; a two-year-old will not declare "I will not eat that." But even in a formal situation, using more colloquial language can come across as forceful and thus have a pragmatic effect; while even talking to ourselves at home, we might instinctively avoid "gonna". Since firmness of intent is always valuable, simply talking differently than you normally do— in either direction— might have a communicative purpose. And if you are teaching foreigners, you certainly do not want to simply communicate that more formal is always better.

(The abbreviations are tied up wth our over-consciousness of writing. Most of us are used to saying "gonna" and writing "going to", to the extent that we may not be reliable witnesses about what we actually say out loud.)

And yes, we can use the present tense to talk about the future too. And the past! "If you stopped smoking, you'd be healthier."
I don't recognise this description at all. It's true that "going to" isn't allowed in legalese, but then a lot of things aren't - and some things are allowed in legalese that aren't allowed in English. Outside of legal papers and a few formal documents aspiring to similar archaicising formality, I don't see a significant register difference between 'going to' and 'will'. Indeed, for me, "I'll open a formal investigation" sounds lower in register than "I'm going to open a formal investigation", which sounds very formal.

What there clearly are, however, are systematic and regular differences in mood and aspect. I just don't see how a "oh, people talk weird to make a point" theory can explain those systematic and regular differences - there are lots of ways people could change their register, and lots of meanings they could intend by it, so there's no reason to think that that would result in the predictable patterns of meaning that we see. And if they did result in those patterns, I think we'd have to acknowledge that those patterns were part of the meaning of the words, not just some sort of accident. It feels like the equivalent of saying ' "heretofore" and "going forward" differ in register, so that's the difference between them, not this "past" and "future" business, that's just a coincidental result of people employing different registers for effect.' Except that in this case I don't think there's even much of a difference in register.

Even if 'register' is the culprit here, you're going to have to teach pupils something like gmalivuk's rules to explain how 'register' is used to convey mood and aspect - at which point, why aren't those rules what's really going on, if they're what explains the usage?
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Cedh »

Looking at it from the outside, as a non-native speaker: Could it be that this is one of the questions that can't be answered anymore for more than a few varieties of English at the same time? After all, details of semantics and pragmatics tend to change the quickest when dialects diverge...

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Travis B. »

One note is that, to me at least, written English that is not specifically informal - and not just legalese - does not use be going to, but spoken English that is not in the very highest register uses be going to very heavily. This makes speaking of this in terms of register more complex, because what is acceptable in higher registers in speech is not necessarily acceptable in higher registers in writing.
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Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Sumelic »

Relevant Language Log post that I don't think anyone has linked to yet: Will vs. going to: a recount

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Pole, the »

snappdragon wrote:My English teacher Mrs. Shirley told me that there are 6 tenses in English: Past, Present, Future, Past Perfect, Present Perfect, and Future Perfect.
Of course she's wrong. She forgot Future-in-the-Past and Future-in-the Past Perfect!
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