Re: Tense and aspect (was: savoir-connaître)

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 09:06:06 -0500, J. 'Mach' Wust
<j_mach_wust@...> wrote:
> Have a look at an English course for foreigners, and you'll see that English
> is teached to have two future tenses: The construction with the auxiliary
> _will_ (and maybe _shall_) and the construction with _to be going to_.
Absolutely, but that's not the case here.  The English sentence
"Tomorrow I go to work" cannot be interpreted as the "going to"
future, because that construct requires that the verb "go" be in the
progressive.  Therefore I interpreted the  sentences as referring to
the noun "work", meaning
"workplace", "place of business", and used the French term "bureau"
which is literally "office".
This is not the only possibility; "Tomorrow I go to work" could also
be interpreted as "Tomorrow, I will begin my task." or similar; in
that case, "to work" is an infinitive again, but it's still not the
"going to" future.  It's just the present tense verb being used to
indicate future action, which happens all the time in English.  Common
examples:

"Are you here tomorrow?"
"No, I'm out all next week."
"When does your flight leave?"

Besides, if "to work" were a verb, there would be a whole other class
of sentences to contrast  with: "I work", "I will work", "I might
work", etc, without the "go" at all.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Watch the Reply-To!

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