This topic is currently marked as "dormant"—the last message is more than 90 days old. You can revive it by posting a reply.
1CliffordDorset
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
>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.
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
>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.
