Tense about tenses

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Tense about tenses

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1CliffordDorset
Apr 19, 2015, 3:57 pm

Are tenses being phased out of the public consciousness? The future tense seems to be increasingly abandoned, particularly amongst weather forecasters. These days they say things like 'Wednesday is cold and wet', when they mean 'will be cold and wet'.

2Muscogulus
Apr 29, 2015, 1:06 pm

>1 CliffordDorset:

Maybe it's an unconscious reaction to the lack, in English, of a real future tense. We just tack a modal verb (shall, will) in front of an infinitive. Barbarous.

3PossMan
Apr 29, 2015, 3:03 pm

>1 CliffordDorset:: And the same sort of thing happens with the past tense. As in "X does whatever" when actually X did it in the past. Quite a common structure in modern novels but has a long history — examples can be found in the Greek New Testament. Can't say its use in modern fiction worries me. In fact it seems to give a sort of extra 'punch' to the sentence.