In Germanic languages, including English, a common expression of the future is
using the present tense, with the futurity expressed using words that imply future
action (
I go to Berlin
tomorrow
or
I am going to Berlin
tomorrow
). There is no
simple (morphological) future tense as such. However, the future can also be
expressed by employing an auxiliary construction that combines certain present
tense auxiliary verbs with the simple infinitive (stem) of the main verb. These
auxiliary forms vary between the languages. Other, generally more informal,
expressions of futurity use an auxiliary with the compound infinitive of the main
verb (as with the English
is going to ...
).
English grammar provides a number of ways to indicate the future nature of an
occurrence. Some argue that English, like most Germanic languages, does not have
a future tense
[4]
—that is, a grammatical form that always indicates futurity—nor
does it have a mandatory form for the expression of futurity. However, through
gradual development from its Germanic roots, English became what is now
considered a language strongly future-tense-marking.
[5]
Currently, there are several
generally accepted ways to indicate futurity in English, and some of them—
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