Monty Python and the Holy Grail, John Cleese to Eric Idle:
“Then you shall not have been mortally wounded.”
What tense is this?
Future perfect.
In the passive voice?
I forget the exact distinction betwen shall and will offhand, but I’m sure the National Socialist Party of Grammar will provide the details.
It’s passive voice, though. That’s where the “be” is coming from.
Yes, but that’s not tense. (Strictly speaking, neither is the perfect aspect)
There’s no difference between will and shall. Some people have attempted to create a distinction c.f. the old joke: the drowning person cries “I shall drown; no one will save me!” while the suicidal exclaims “I will drown; no one shall save me!” But this is only enforced in the most artificial and formal of settings.
Let there be light because I will it to be so.
Let there be light because I shall it to be so.
I will (it).
I shall (it).
That’s will as a transitive verb and not an auxiliary.
Nitpick: the copula (“be”) is not related to passive voice. The passivity is a property of the verb (“wounded”) in that its thematic patient is the subject of the clause.
From what I remember of my linguistics classes this is correct, and applies pretty much to all the other Germanic languages as well. Romance languages, by contrast have several more tenses that are formed by inflections on the verbs themselves, rather than through the use of auxiliaries. OTOH, due to the loss of phonemic distinctions in late Latin, many of these inflections do not descend from those of Latin, but were “reconstituted” in the early Middle Ages as Latin dialects diverged into various Romance languages. At least, so says the Wiki article on Vulgar Latin.
Again according to a Wiki article on that language, Afrikaans has mostly lost the simple past tense, using only adverbial expressions and/or perfect tense constructions to convey past actions. If this is correct then we could say Afrikaans has only one tense.
I was actually taught all those, but we learned it as three tenses and three aspects.
“Be going to” is just another way to indicate the simple future. Thus “be going to be ___ing” is future progressive. The fact that there is more than one word that works for this is one of the flaws of the three (or nine) tense system.
I do not know about “used to,” but I would not be surprised if that was just simple past, despite the change of emphasis.
Actually, both of these do have slight differences in use. “Used to” emphasizes the fact that what was true in the past is no longer, and “going to” carries a connotation of immediacy that is absent in “will.” But I am unaware of any system that distinguishes this sort of thing.
You’re mistaken, which you’d know if you spent much time with formal specifications (for one of many examples where the distinction is important).
In formal specifications for implementations of standards, “xxx shall” means that “an implementation of xxx is required to”, whereas “xxx will” means what we normally mean it to mean, that is, “xxx” happens as a matter of course.
In everyday language, “shall” is rarely used, and when it is, it’s the same as “will”. But “everyday language” is not representative of all uses of English. Nor would I call the above “jargon,” as the same usage applies to things as different as computer protocol specifications and international treaties.
The academic distinction between “will” and “shall” is reversed for “I”, compared to its meaning (for the implied “you” or “the implementation”) in formal specifications. That is, “You shall” is a command, “you will” is a statement of fact, whereas “I shall” is (allegedly) a statement of fact whereas “I will” is (allegedly) a command to oneself.
Like most folks, I find the latter distinction pretty academic, and I agree with Inner Stickler, that when used with “I”, there is no meaningful difference.
But in formal specs, which often have to be translated to multiple languages (examples are ISO and ITU documents, UN documents, etc.), the distinction between “will” and “shall” is important. Even Internet RFCs finally wised up to the ambiguity and began using uppercase for key verbs to indicate the distinctions between what an implementation is required to do and other uses. Cite for RFCs.
Admittedly, the worst and most common ambiguity in specs was the use of “may not”, which could mean either “must not” or “might not”. I’m glad to be rid of those kinds of ambiguities!
How embarrassing. Boy, is my face red. If only I had thought to add some sort of qualification. Maybe something along the lines of:
Yeah, but you’ll still never see a person’s Last Shall and Testament.
The reason “am going to be” in particular occurred to me as I wrote that post is that it seemed like it was necessary to complete the pattern.
The tense am/was/will indicates the time I’m talking about, and the aspect (progressive or perfect) indicates whether the action in question happened at the time I’m talking about or before the time I’m talking about.
E.g.:
“I was jumping.” (past progressive)
“I had jumped.” (past perfect)
Are both talking about the past, but one of those is the describing an action that was still happening in that past time, and one is describing an action that had already happened. So it seems logical that there would also be a name for a sentence that describes an action that had yet to happen in that past time, like “I was going to be jumping” or “I was about to jump.”
To me that seems somehow more fundamental than a construction like “I had been jumping.” Even though I’m sure I say “had been” all the time without thinking about it, I’m not sure I can entirely articulate why you need it.
But of course just because I think “going to be” ought to have a name doesn’t mean that it does.
After I posted this, we went’ to a restaurant whose first seafood offering was baked scrod. My wife couldn’t figure out why I was laughing until I had to blow my nose, and I couldn’t explain it in front of the kids…