why future is not a tense maker in English grammar?
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Basically, English does not have a future tense because:
(1) It does not have any verb morphology specifically dedicated to future tense;
(2) All the putative markers of 'futurity' in English are actually modal verbs, which themselves have present and past tense. Thus as the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddlestone and Pullum 2002) notes, 'will' actually does not consistently mark futurity, and futurity is not consistently marked by 'will':
Present time Future time
Simple Present That is the doctor. They meet in the final in May.
will + plain form That will be the doctor. They will meet in the final in May.
Some more examples of various future constructions in English:
The train leaves at 3:17 P.M.
Mother will cook ham for dinner tonight, so be on time!
The judge ordered that the accused man be released on parole.
The author's latest book is coming out in June.
The new regulations are to come into force next year
(3) The issues that arise in (2) result from the fact that English never grammaticalized a category of futurity like it has present and past. If something is in the past, one generally has to mark it with the past tense verb morphology, but this is not true of the future, which really might be called the nonpast.
As I note in my other response linked above, these facts illustrate how language is not a simple direct reflection of the world around us; language has its own autonomous structure which is not reducible to that world.
(1) It does not have any verb morphology specifically dedicated to future tense;
(2) All the putative markers of 'futurity' in English are actually modal verbs, which themselves have present and past tense. Thus as the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddlestone and Pullum 2002) notes, 'will' actually does not consistently mark futurity, and futurity is not consistently marked by 'will':
Present time Future time
Simple Present That is the doctor. They meet in the final in May.
will + plain form That will be the doctor. They will meet in the final in May.
Some more examples of various future constructions in English:
The train leaves at 3:17 P.M.
Mother will cook ham for dinner tonight, so be on time!
The judge ordered that the accused man be released on parole.
The author's latest book is coming out in June.
The new regulations are to come into force next year
(3) The issues that arise in (2) result from the fact that English never grammaticalized a category of futurity like it has present and past. If something is in the past, one generally has to mark it with the past tense verb morphology, but this is not true of the future, which really might be called the nonpast.
As I note in my other response linked above, these facts illustrate how language is not a simple direct reflection of the world around us; language has its own autonomous structure which is not reducible to that world.
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