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These generally express some form of modality (possibility, obligation, etc.), although will and would (and sometimes shall and should) can serve—among their other uses—to express future time reference and conditional mood, as described elsewhere on this page. For details of the uses of modal verbs, see English modal verbs.
In grammar, a future tense (abbreviated FUT) is a verb form that generally marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future. An example of a future tense form is the French achètera , meaning "will buy", derived from the verb acheter ("to buy").
Relative future is also possible for a limited number of uses of the modular "will" or "shall" in their so-called past tense forms, respectively "would" and "should" (see future in the past). Periphrastic phrases may be able to express some relative future meanings that are otherwise unattested. For example, the phrase "to be about to" means ...
Historically, prescriptive grammar stated that, when expressing pure futurity (without any additional meaning such as desire or command), shall was to be used when the subject was in the first person, and will in other cases (e.g., "On Sunday, we shall go to church, and the preacher will read the Bible.")
The form "were" can also be used with an infinitive to form a future less vivid conditional. [3] Future Less Vivid: If I were to be king, I could have you thrown in the dungeon. Counterfactuals can also use the pluperfect instead of the past tense. Conditional perfect: If you had called me, I would have come.
The present tense is indicated with the non-past imperfective form. The future in the perfective aspect is expressed by applying the conjugation of the present form to the perfective version of the verb. There is also a compound future imperfective form consisting of the future of "to be" plus the infinitive of the imperfective verb.
Expressing a future action with the conditional mood is exactly the same as the present, although an additional word referring to either a definite or indefinite time in the future is often used: majd (then), holnap (tomorrow), etc. Ha holnap ráérnék, megcsinálnám a házimat. "If I had time tomorrow, I would do my homework."
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.