English sometimes has several different ways of expressing the same thing. For example, it can form a possessive either by using an old case inflection:
- The dog’s tail was always wagging.
Or it can do so periphrastically:
- The tail of the dog was always wagging.
Those are both possessives, the one an inflectional possessive and the other a periphrastic possessive. The same appears to be possible with tenses, too, not just with possessives. In Jeremy Butterfield’s The Arguments of Time (OUP 2006), he writes:
A tense is inflectional if it is realized as an affix on a head (in English, a verb), periphrastic if it is realized as an independent word. Thus the English past is inflectional, but the future is periphrastic, co-opting the modal will.
This accords with the OED’s definition of tense:
Gram. Any one of the different forms or modifications (or word-groups) in the conjugation of a verb which indicate the different times (past, present, or future) at which the action or state denoted by it is viewed as happening or existing, and also (by extension) the different nature of such action or state, as continuing (imperfect) or completed (perfect); also abstr. that quality of a verb which depends on the expression of such differences.
Indeed, one of the citations under that sense draws attention to this:
- The tenses of the English verb are made partly by inflection, partly by the use of auxiliary verbs.
As far as I can tell, tense cannot be just an alias for “inflection” as some here have been saying. At least, not if the sources cited above are to be believed.
And my question is. . .
Aren’t these all tenses, both the inflectional1 tenses and the periphrastic2 tenses alike?
1. Inflectional tenses are sometimes also known as synthetic tenses.
2. Periphrastic tenses are sometimes also known as analytic tenses, or analytical tenses — or sometimes, compound tenses.
When did compound tenses stop being tenses? Or have they? Isn’t that what these people who pretend that ‘English has no future tense’ are actually saying, that periphrastic tenses are not tenses?
If so, then the OED does not support the notion. Under their definition of periphrastic. . .
Of the nature of, characterized by, or involving periphrasis; circumlocutory; roundabout.
. . . they have a note, which covers both verbs and possessives:
- periphrastic conjugation (in Grammar), a conjugation formed by the combination of a simple verb and an auxiliary, as distinct from a simple formation from the verb-stem.
- periphrastic genitive, an equivalent of the genitive case, formed by aid of a preposition, as of in Eng., de in Fr.
So periphrastic forms seem real, whether as tenses or genitives. I do not see how periphrastic started to mean ersatz or bogus or fake. So why have some people begun to treat periphrastic tenses as fake tenses? No, they aren’t inflectional tenses, but why does this matter? Other languages have plenty of kinds of periphrastic tenses, and nobody discounts them there. So why have they started trying to discount them in English?
If one were allowed to bring Romance into the picture, then it might be useful to point out that sometimes both inflectional and periphrastic versions of the same tense exist, and that nobody there ever pretends one is a tense and the other is not.
In Latin, periphrastic conjugations existed, allowing you to use portātūrus sum for “I’m going to carry”, which coëxists with the purely inflectional future, portābō. This is like how in modern Romance you can have both an inflectional future tense (FR je porterai; ES portaré) and a periphrastic future tense (FR je vais porter; ES voy a portar).
In French, for example, you can put a present-tense sentence like je porte into the past in either of two equivalent ways: via the passé composé with j’ai porté or via the passé simple with je portai. No one calls the first one present tense there, because it is not perceived as such. Similarly, the pluperfect exists only as a compound/periphrastic tense in French, but j’avais porté is not called the past tense (even though avais itself is in the imparfait), but rather the pluperfect, the plus-que-parfait.
In Spanish, there are two versions of the pluperfect tense, a rare inflectional one and a common periphrastic one. The compound version of the pluperfect indicative is había portado, whereas the purely inflectional version is portara (which is normally one of the two imperfect subjunctives). Those are both considered to be in the pluperfect. Nobody calls había portado as being in the imperfect just because había is; that would be wrong: it is in the pluperfect.
In modern Romance, the inflectional future and the inflectional conditional were once periphrastic tenses but are now inflectional ones. The present-tense auxiliary was used for the then-compound future, and the imperfect-tense auxiliary was used for the then-compound conditional. Specifically, they used either a present-tense or past-tense form of to have, inflected for person and number, appended to the infinitive. Eventually this became fused in writing — completely fused in most of them but only partially fused in Portuguese, where mesoclitics are still permitted. The compound tense did not suddenly become a “real” tense just when people stopped writing it with a space, nor does it cease to be one when in Portuguese a mesoclitic intervenes.