ABSTRACT
In A5 it was suggested that, for several reasons, will should not be regarded as the future tense in English – indeed, that English has no future tense. One of the reasons was that be going to also has a claim because, although it is less frequent, it is a much clearer indicator of futurity than will. In this extract from a chapter on ‘Time and Reality’, after outlining the major uses of past and present tenses, Payne compares will and be going to as candidates for future tense. He does this, unusually but interestingly for a textbook, by means of an experiment which involved asking three native speakers to judge the acceptability of sentences containing both contenders. (It should be noted that such grammaticality judgements are not always reliable.)
