Reflections on the status of the immediate future between tense and aspect from a cross-linguistic perspective
In typological research,the time reference of the immediate future is the same as that of the proximative and prospective,both of which use a certain grammatical form to indicate that an event is about to occur.However,differences in the upper category have caused many controversies.By examining cross-linguistic corpora,this paper proposes that their tense meaning is more prominent and that they can have relatively pure prediction use with the advancement of grammaticalization.The materials of Chinese,West Greenlandic and Mongolian prove that the immediate future can be directly derived from a variety of aspectual meanings.The diachronic evolution of English indicates an evolutionary relationship between the usage of the immediate future or the prospective and simple future.The semantic features of the proximate or immediate future are unstable,and sometimes,it is difficult to distinguish it clearly from a simple future.If the gram-type of the immediate future is classified as phasal aspect,it is not convenient to explain the unidirectionality of grammaticalization or make cross-linguistic comparisons between tense and aspect.
万方数据
维普
