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Will: tense or modal or both?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2010

RAPHAEL SALKIE
RAPHAEL SALKIE*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9PH, UKr.m.salkie@bton.ac.uk
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Abstract

Most grammarians refuse to treat will as a marker of future tense in English. We examine the arguments against treating will as a tense and find them weak; the arguments in favour of treating it as a modal also turn out to be poor. We argue that will should be treated as a marker of future tense, and that its so-called modal uses are either not modal or have independent explanations. The one exception is the volitional use of will: to account for this, we propose that willingness is a semantic relic from an earlier meaning of the word.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 14 , Issue 2: Future time reference in English , July 2010 , pp. 187 - 215
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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