Development of lexical ways of expressing futurality in English

Obviously, linguists have particular difficulties in interpreting the “future in the past.” As rightly noted by V.P. Kobkov, “the future in the past” has not yet found a generally recognized place in the system of grammatical categories of the English verb. [6, p.60]. That is why, in our opinion, the traditional concept is more legitimate, according to which the category of time is composed of three divisions: present, past and future. However, most supporters of this point of view often consider the combinations shall / will + infinitive (in addition to the grammatical way of referring to the sphere of the future) as one of the means of expressing modal meanings in the language. (1, G.N. Vorontsova, B.A. Ilyish and others). This opinion, in fact, became dominant in the practical grammars of the English language (E.S. Izrailevich, K.N. Kachalova; B.JI. Kaushanskaya; B.M. Gordon; R.V. Reznik; T.M. Zhimalenkova, M.A. Belyaeva and others). A constant meaning that unites all forms of the “future” is the meaning of following in terms of the present, parallel to the general meaning of the forms of “the future in the past.” The remaining categorical meanings seem to be layered on top of it and accompany it. So, for example, in the forms “future continuous” and “future continuous in the past”, the value of the following is accompanied by the value of the duration of the action, etc. This means that the syntactic scope of the forms “should / would + infinitive” is as wide as the scope of the forms “shall/will + infinitive”. Based on this, supporters of the second point of view distinguish four tense forms in the English verb system, i.e. present, past, future and future in the past. However, they themselves are forced to admit that the future in the English language is split into two independent axes of orientation, one of which repels and depends on the present, the other on the past. In recent years, in domestic and foreign English studies, the concept has become widespread, according to which the category of time is a two-term system, formed by contrasting only two categorical forms of time: present and past. This concept owes its appearance to the statements of J.O. Kerm and O. Jespersen, who at the beginning of the century spoke about the unjustified allocation of the future tense paradigm among the tense forms of the English verb. Putting forward the thesis that future forms are not located on the same line of time with the present and the past, supporters of the point of view of the duality of the category of time generally deny the temporal meaning of the formations “shall / will + infinitive”, which, in our opinion, leads to difficulty in determining places of these combinations in the general system of the English verb. Some authors attribute them to modal syntactic combinations, others consider them forms of indirect mood. It should be emphasized that the study of the means of expressing the future in the English language in the diachronic plan is predominantly disparate: attention is paid only to the grammatical method or only to the lexical means of expressing the future action, or it concerns a certain historical period. The object of research is the future action in English. The subject of the research is the grammatical and lexical ways of expressing the future action at different historical stages of the development of the English language.

Unlike the verb shall, which already in Middle English in combination with the infinitive became a grammatical way of expressing the future action, the final grammatical of the combination with will occur only in the Early New English period. At this time, will, as a rule, completely loses its lexical meaning of the will and, in combination with the infinitive, turns into an auxiliary verb. We will haste us. There are two parallel analytic forms in Early New English that convey the meaning of the objective future tense: shall + infinitive and will + infinitive. At the beginning of the period, both of these forms were used for all three persons, singular and plural. The grammarians of the 16th century, as well as Gill, name two forms of the future tense: the construction shall and will with the infinitive and the simple present tense, and they do not distinguish between the auxiliary verbs shall and will. However, by the middle of the XVII century. The rule on the distribution of shall and will by persons did not accurately reflect reality. Ch. Freese counted the use of shall and will by persons, starting from the era of Shakespeare, and proved that there was no such distribution at all [7, p.153]. In Early New English, contracted forms like I’ll do, you’ll do, he’ll do, etc. were first recorded: Well wait upon you. [Sh, Hamlet]you’ll be secret? [Sh, Hamlet], but shell keep her word. [Sh, Hamlet] According to experts, the abbreviated form of the auxiliary verb ll goes back to will, because the phoneme

[ʃ] is not amenable to phonetic reduction. This gives grounds to conclude that in the Early New English period the future form with will begins to displace the older form with shall. Lists of meanings of constructions with shall and will during the period of their intensive use in the 15th - 18th centuries, given in many works, do not create a clear picture. Some linguists give many meanings of shall and will, while others list only more generalized meanings. F. Blackburn defines them as “a promise and a threat.” According to B. Trnka, the future with will conveys spontaneous actions or actions that will occur at the will of another person or due to circumstances. [3, 2009; c.123]. Nevertheless, despite the modal shades, the frequency of future constructions as a means of indicating future action is growing. In the era of Shakespeare, as well as in Middle English, the construction with shall and will could freely alternate with the present form in clauses of condition and time.

"Экономика и социум" №4(95) 2022