>No future tense
Many European languages also lack a future tense. English, for example. (https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-English-has-no-future-...)
Many European languages also lack a future tense. English, for example. (https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-English-has-no-future-...)
English has no inflected future tense because of the way words are usually defined. Verbs in English only have 4 types of inflections because words are defined as whatever is surrounded by spaces in writing. If we define words as the unit that carries a single beat in speaking, so "He is-to-see-it tomorrow" is 3 words, then verbs also have prefixed inflections. English then does have an inflected future tense.
The "is to" future form isn't mentioned in discussions on future tense very often but seems to have the most predetermination, whereas "is going to" and "will" indicate more volition by the doer.
> If we define words as the unit that carries a single beat in speaking
Note that this definition clearly won't do what you want it to do (even ignoring the imprecision of "single beat"), as the units you want to treat as verbs can be separated to an arbitrary degree. E.g. "Is he really, in your opinion, to see her tomorrow?"
Here you're defining syntax around your orthographic definition of what a word is.
> "Is he really, in your opinion, to see her tomorrow?"
The opinion words "really" and "in your opinion" added into that syntactic structure parallel the manner that opinion word "bloody" is added into a lexical structure to become "abso-bloody-lutely".
No, I'm not. As I said, there is no unit in English (regardless of whether or not it is written as a single word) that both behaves like a verb and has a distinct future form.
>The opinion words "really" and "in your opinion" added into that syntactic structure parallel the manner that opinion word "bloody" is added into a lexical structure to become "abso-bloody-lutely".
You seem to have missed that fact that even if you remove "really" and "in your opinion", the unit you identified as a verb is still broken up in the example I gave. In "Is he to see her tomorrow?", "is-to-see" is not a contiguous unit. Although the idea of treating the subject pronoun as a verbal infix might be charming (English as Mohawk!), the subject could be a much larger phrase, as in e.g. "Is the man in the red hat to see her tomorrow?"
It is simply not true that adjunction of adverbials has the same properties as expletive infixation. Even if there is some loose analogy between these two processes, I fail to see how it's relevant to units defined in terms of a single "beat in speaking".
You can insert stuff between "is" and "to-see" (and between "to" and "see", I hope you agree) because English mostly parses into left-branching trees, which is the only reason why you can't insert stuff between "see" and "-ing". Natural languages don't liberally mix left-branching structures and right-branching ones because they're hard for people to understand. E.g. Pinker's "The rapidity that the motion that the wing that the hummingbird has has has is remarkable" is grammatically correct but not easily understandable. The contiguity or lack of it operates on a different conceptual plane to whether a "word" can be inflected or not.
> loose analogy
To take some example language from your reply, some people speak this as two words, others (e.g. some Americans) as a compound word. Because the concept of a word is not well defined, the boundary between morphology and syntax is blurred. Putting "is" and "to" noncontiguously before a verb is the same as putting "-ed" after a verb. They are both "inflections".
It's clearly thousands of miles away from being a generally accepted analysis of English syntax. So unless you've written up your analysis in detail somewhere, there's not much further to discuss.
Edit: not clearly. There are still some additional assumptions to make with no clear evidence either way (notably, the category of "will"), and the definition of "tense" is a amnigous.
[0] English's rules for V-T movemement are relativly complicated compared to most languages
Yes, there is.
>Under this analysis, English clearly has a future tense.
No, this does not follow. You can just as easily (and more correctly) analyze "will" as a modal auxiliary like "can" or "would". Supposing it's true that "will" is the daughter of I/T/whatever, it doesn't follow that the I/T/whatever head has to have a future tense feature.
You could argue, and some people have, that at some level, the interpretation of "will" involves future tense in some semantic sense, which conceivably might be realized as a feature on a head somewhere in the inflectional spine of the tree. But that tense feature would not have the same kind of straightforward syntactic and morphological motivation as e.g. the +past feature does in English. In the context of a general audience, this isn't a notion of "tense" that's relevant. After all, in this highly abstract sense, even a language such as Chinese might have tense.
FWIW I have a PhD in (generative) syntax. I'm don't think that any generative syntactician addressing a general audience would describe English as having a future tense.
I am looking at this question from the perspective of x-bar theory, and defining "tense" as as a feature of the syntactic catagory that populates the populates the "T" node at deep structure (or a feature of the I catagory). [0].
As I alluded to in my comment, I have never seen a convincing arguement in either direction for wheather "will" is a T or a V; and this was an active discussion in my syntax class about 3 years ago where the proffesor (a syntaxtician) had also said that she never saw a compelling arguement either way. If you know of one, please sharer.
Edit: I think you edited your post after I responded. I would argue that all languages have the same featureset (including tense) at d structure, but that is going far afield.
Edit2: there is also a notion of tense at the sementic level. And English seems to offer a gramaticalized way of providing the sementic future tense, regardless of how you look at the corresponding syntax/morphology.
If we accept that "will" is a syntactic "T" and carries a sementic meaning of "future" then how is it unreasonable to call it a future tense? Sure, there are debatable parts to the above assumptions, but it is a stretch to say that no analysis has future tense. Heck, there is a universal grammar analysis that would say English (and Chinese) has all the tenses, and the only question is which ones surface as distinct pronounciations.
[0] This leads to a notationally weird case where "to" is a tense with a -tense feature.
If you're punning on "tense" to refer to a lexical category, then sure. But we're talking about tense in the sense of past, present and future. In many textbook analyses, lots of things go in T. For example, "can" and "might" go in T. It doesn't follow that, say, "I might go to the store" and "I can go to the store" have a different tense.
Even restricting ourselves to the syntactic features, I have still never seen an arguement for or against English having a syntactic future tense feature that did not come down to UG, or a disagreement about which model is simpler, and neither side is convoluted enough for me to confidently invoke Occam's razor.
This seems like an arbitrary and peculiar way to define tense specifically to exclude periphrastic languages like English. If these are the rules by which we are arguing, the argument doesn't seem that interesting. By this argument colloquial French and German have no past tense because they use periphrastic constructions to expression this distinction.
Tense is a piece of technical terminology with a particular definition. There's nothing very peculiar about the definition that I can see. The definition denies English a future tense because English doesn't have periphrastic units which (i) behave like verbs and (ii) have a distinct future form.
For whatever reason, people are really resistant to taking linguists' word for it on what technical terms within linguistics mean. You don't find people on here trying to argue with physicists about whether they should maybe adopt a different definition of "force" or "mass" or "electron".
Certain things are settled: "will" in English behaves like other English auxiliary verb (setting aside those cases where it doesn't, as in contractions). Saying "English has no future tense", though, is settled only within the confines of a particular linguistic model with a particular technical definition of the term "tense", of which there are many.
Could you then provide a reference to a linguist arguing that English has a future tense (in the usual syntactic/morphological sense of the term)?
I'm baffled by the reference to the "confines of a particular linguistic model". Linguists who can agree on hardly anything else (and linguists are pretty good at disagreeing!) can agree that English lacks a future tense.