The Temporal Reference of the English Futurate

Abstract

There are two closely-related ways of talking about the future in English, the will-future and the futurate. The constructions are not interchangeable, because the futurate involves some kind of plan, schedule, control, or pattern of events, while the will-future is not so restricted. This restriction on the futurate is familiar and has been discussed by grammarians at least since Jespersen 1931. Less familiarly, the futurate does not fit neatly into a general syntactic-semantic account of temporal reference in English: neither adverbial nor aspectual forms play their characteristic roles in this construction. Because it is problematic, the futurate is of some interest for the study of temporal reference. Particularly interesting are the truth-conditional and presentational variations of aspect. The futurate in a general account of temporal reference is the specific topic of this paper.