Please tell me what the rule is

[MisguidedAngel]

I am one of a small English/French group of friends who meet once a week to help each other with language. This week we were transating a French text - the literal translation was "while I will be enjoying myself, they will be writing their boring essays". We said that the correct English would be "while I am enjoying myself, they will be ..." - in other words, we wouldn't use the future tense after "while". We all knew this is correct, but we couldn't quote the rule, and one of our French friends, a bit of a pedant herself, really wants to know WHY. Can you help?

Dad you'll just have to take our word for it that "tense" is different from "grammatical way of marking time relative to now". I agree that English has far more than two grammatical ways of marking time relative to now although you and I might reach a different total.

It's a fascinating area of anthropology, actually, and how language reflects thought and vice versa. You get into count/mass, where some cultures count milk and others measure cows, so they're differently good at spot-the-difference puzzles with quantity changes.

We think of things like plurals and tenses as being absolute things but what comparative linguistics shows us is that there is no such thing. Typically cultures only count if they trade, for example; modern European languages note tense in a linear fashion because of a linear outlook; cultures focusing on cycles put more emphasis on "how long" than whether it comes before or after, just as English doesn't require you to know whether the thing at arms' reach is North or West of you.

I've found some discussion of my questions which quotes some academics and shows that it is right to say technically:

1. English has no future tense
2. Based on inflection, English only has two tenses (present tense and the past tense you get by adding 'ed')

So you were right, but it helps to see some justification! For practical purposes, eg teaching English as a foreign language, future tense is a useful concept, although it looks like it's quite a challenge to actually teach all the different ways we express futurity.

grammar.about.com/od/grammarfaq/a/Does-The-English-Language-Have-A-Future-Tense.htm
(author is a professor of English - qualifications do help if they show that here is someone who has studied the matter rigorously).

Fatal - as you can see, what I've read suggests that you are right, but can I just say I find it really annoying for someone to say "you just have to take our word for it"! Surely, there are academic works which set out a widely agreed definition among linguists of what tense means? Even if you can't show those works, I'd be happier if you mentioned the names of some books / papers that give a rigorous treatment of tense.

Yes, it is annoying but since this is Pedants' Corner rather than Cunning Linguists and I'm not in the same room as any of my books and I'm not on the laptop to retrieve studies ... it's all you're getting.

On the other hand, it is annoying when linguists use words differently from their more common usage.

I always refer to an excellent, yet accessible to the layman, article in the English Teaching Professional journal from Oct 96 (issue 9) when this argument over tenses comes up. Sylvia Chalker wrote a very interesting piece about tenses, in which she quotes Sidney Greenbaum as saying:

"English has only two tenses of the verb- present simple and past simple"

"Have run" by the way, is present perfect, not past perfect.

I always rather enjoy using half an hour of lesson time getting my students to list all the "tenses" in English (not forgetting of course, largely defunct, yet still extant subjunctive "tenses") and then giving them the ta-dah "there are only 2" moment.

Obviously it is pedantic, but it's also very interesting, and if you know this stuff, then you don't need to list any of your qualifications, because, as Fatal says, that would be twatty. And unnecessary. When it's right, it's right.

"When it's right, it's right" - that sounds dangerously like "you have to accept that what I say is right". My point is not your qualifications but your ability to present convincing evidence is what shows you are right.

Anyway, I appear to have wandered in to a crowd of English teachers, and I'm an ex-Maths teacher, so I shall bow out gracefully. Actually, forget my use of the future "tense", I am bowing out now.

I'm not an English teacher. I'm a linguist.

I'm an English teacher, though haven't listed any qualifications. Nor, as far as I can see, has anyone else.

I would also, for example, take a maths' experts word on maths stuff, rather than being tetchy and asking for empirical evidence or published documents.

But if I had asked for either, and was then given them, I'd probably just say thanks, and accept that I'd learned something I didn't know before.

But that's me.

And far from being "you have to accept that what I say is right"...I would never presume to put myself in the same league as those published linguists such as the ones I mentioned, or David Crystal, or Randolph Quirke, or any of the other illustrious bods whose mighty tomes are on my bookshelf. It's not what I say, it's what they say.