Future Times, Future Tenses

Abstract

Abstract From our present point of view, the future is not fixed. While there is arguably only one past, the future is largely ‘open’ and/or ‘indeterminate’. For this reason, linguistic temporal reference to the future is often seen as special. One consequence is that some scholars question the existence of the category ‘future tense’, often reinterpreting it as a modal category. This collection of chapters seeks to shed light on the way speakers anchor events in the future, and it does this from a multidisciplinary perspective: philosophy of language, formal semantics, linguistic typology, pragmatics, and developmental psychology. Data come from very diverse languages, including non-Indo-European ones. This, together with the broad range of methods and theoretical options exemplified, will provide the reader with a comprehensive view of contemporary research on the future in language.

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