Thursday, July 19, 2007

Future tenses and periphrastic constructions in Romance languages

Languages that have a true future tense include the Romance languages; most also have a periphrastic construction, like English. For example, French has a true future tense j'aimerai, tu aimeras, il aimera, "he will love" (from aimer, to like and il a, he has, so it's literally "He has to love"), but the future is most commonly expressed with the verb aller as an auxiliary: je vais aimer, tu vas aimer, il va aimer.

As in English, this periphrastic construction is also available in the past, by conjugating aller to the imperfect: j'allais voir "I was going to see". Depending on grammatical context, this can sometimes be done with the conditional: Le lendemain, il reconnaîtrait son erreur (The day after, he would recognize his mistake).

Confusingly, Catalan uses the verb anar for periphrastic constructions both in the future (with the preposition a) and the past (without the preposition). In other words, jo vaig a veure is "I will see"; jo vaig veure is "I saw."

Many Romance languages use the future tense also to refer to a supposition or a statement about habit, for example in Spanish: serán las once ("It will be 11 o'clock," meaning "I suppose it's around 11, it must be 11 by now"). This construction is also found in German.

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