초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Some grammarians, Jespersen and Palmer, insist that English does not have a future tense and also English has 2-tense system because WILL is not a future tense as past tense and present tense are. They do not want to categorize WILL as tense but as a modal verb which is used to express modalities in English. But Wekker and Declerck do not agree with this but they want to show the evidences which reveal WILL is a future tense in English. Actually, WILL is used as a future tense by English speakers as they recognize WILL functions as a future tense. It means that actual usage of WILL also has a future tense even if it is categorized as a modal verb. In this paper, I would like to tell that WILL has the meaning of future tense which is different from the modality that WILL expresses and that WILL functions as a future tense as past tense and present tense. So, WILL is an important modal verb but it is also a future tense because there are some usages that show us that the WILL is used to express future event as a future tense. And as we see, some usages will prove that WILL plays a role as a future tense in English.
