In my piece on Present simple and Progressive (ELTWeekly 8 Sep 2020), in Notes on the “more complicated” Stuff, I mentioned four ways of talking about the future. Here are the first two (I’ll look at the other two next week):
- Intention: “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair.” (song) going to
- Prediction: “It will be cold in Finland.” will
But first I want to talk about time, and especially the future.
We know what happened in the past, and we have a past tense to talk about it. We also know what’s happening in the present, both now and what happens regularly, and we have two present tenses to talk about all of that.
Many languages also have a future tense, that is to say, a form of the verb to talk about the future, but English doesn’t. There is no future tense in English. Why not?
My personal opinion is that this is because we know (more or less) what happened in the past and we know (more or less) what’s happening now, but we simply don’t know what the future will bring. In English, we can talk about the future in three ways: Intentions, Predictions, Plans and Schedules.
1 Intentions: going to.
We know what we hope to do, and we can guess what other people – and even nature – might decide to do, so we have sentences like these:
- I’m going to tell my boss what I think of him (oops!).
- He’s wobbling on that bike, he’s going to fall off!
- Look at those clouds, it’s going to rain.
We use going to to signal our intentions, and when we’re talking about other people – and things – we use going to especially when we can see what someone is going to do or that something is going to happen.
2 Predictions: will, may, might
We don’t know what will happen in the future, but we can guess, or predict. There’s a scale of three words to express how sure we are, or how sure we want to appear to be, about the future:
might 30% sure (it could happen, but I doubt it)
may 60% sure (I am fairly optimistic about it)
will 90% sure (some people will say 100%, but you can never be 100%
sure of anything in the future!)
We tend to use this about future events for which there is no present evidence:
“It is going to rain” sounds as if you can see a cloud
“It will rain” sounds like a comment on the approaching rainy season.
Here’s a picture of two guys at an airport.
The guy on the left is stating his intentions. This is what he wants to do.
The guy on the right is making a prediction. He knows something about the weather in Moscow.
Here’s a video you can look at.
3 Plans and Schedules: present progressive and present simple
I’ll talk about these next week
Notes on “more complicated” stuff
1 Native speakers
Natice speakers are anarchic, and don’t care much about language rules. This sounds like a bad thing, but I don’t think it is: a language is a living thing and speakers are free to do what they like. This freedom enables language to keep growing and changing in order to satisfy the needs of millions of speakers all over the world. Nouns like mouse and computer, verbs like uploading and scamming, came out of nowhere, have not been authorised by any official body, they just happened. And we have welcomed them into our lives with open arms.
2 The future
Native speakers do all sorts of things with future forms, so although I lay out the underlying meaning of the ways we can talk about the future, don’t expect native speakers to always obey the rules! Every speaker has their own view, and their own way of saying what they mean (I’ll write about ‘singular they’ another day). Some people feel doubtful, some feel sure, some state their intentions, others make the future look fixed. Everyone is different, unique, and everyone speaks in their own unique way.
3 Going to
My feeling is – and it’s no more than a feeling – that native speakers regularly use going to – usually shortened in quick,casual speech to gonna – to talk about the future, and some speakers use it almost to the exclusion of will. This doesn’t say anything about the language and what it can do. But it might say something about the speaker.
Every situation is different, and quick, informal speech is often fine, but It is also useful, especially in more formal situations, to know whether a speaker is saying what he plans to do, or what he thinks will happen.
Next week I’ll talk about plans and schedules.