At some point in my blogging, I criticized Porter about his definition of the Future tense form, particularly for this statement:
Rather than temporal values, the future form grammaticalizes the semantic (meaning) feature of expectation.
Stanley E. Porter, Idioms of the Greek New Testament (Sheffield: JSOT, 1999), 44.
Not only is this definition some what silly sounding since its exactly what we would expect a future tense to do anyway, but Porter, neither in his grammar or in his dissertation, gives much argument or evidence on the subject.
Enter, today’s post from the Language Log, “What’s Will?” written by Mark Libermann a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania. In his post his argues and provides evidence that English does not have a future tense. Now whether you agree with him or not is up to you, my point is simply to show what kind of evidence is actually required in making such a claim.
And then also for a bit of humor, here is the other post from today at the Language Log: “The ghost of complex English auxiliary strings.”
Koine-Greek 