Revisiting the Description of Tense in English

The controversy surrounding the description of tense in English has remained because scholars have concentrated on carving descriptive niches for themselves rather than paying appropriate attention to its causative factor(s), resulting in three different descriptions: traditional, structural, and systemic. This paper identifies the genesis of the problems, points out how this hinders the attainment of descriptive accuracy, and proffers some solutions. It contends that arguments, such as whether or not there is a future tense for English, stem from the way tense is generally conceptualised. It examined ten standard definitions of tense and found that the keyword grammaticalisation is narrowly interpreted to mean the morphological only, whereas a language’s grammatical system consists of both syntactical and morphological aspects. The non-recognition of the syntactical component—even by grammarians that acknowledge future tense—is the root of the descriptive issues with tense. The paper proposes syntactical marking, achieved by placing the auxiliary WILL/SHALL or BE GOING TO before the base form verb, as the mechanism for future tense marking in English. In effect, English has a three-tense system, and its modes of marking are morphological (for present and past tenses) and syntactical (for future tense).