Basic Clause Patternstense and then compare the two versions of the passage.
At about seven o’clock, Mr Phillips hears the dustbin lorry turn into
the far end of the street. The dustmen call to each other, shout, bang
bins, swear, make noises that are associated with the effort of heaving
bags up onto the back of the cart, all the sounds which are always
different but always the same. The lorry is part of its being Monday,
a process which started last thing on Sunday night with remember-
ing to put out the rubbish—which is more complicated than it once
was, since the council now recycles rubbish, and there are different-
coloured plastic bags and different weekly schedules for paper and
plastics and bottles. Cardboard, however, you still have to either put
in with the normal rubbish or take it up to the council dump by the
dog track, which Mr and Mrs Phillips have formally decided, after
doing it what felt like a million times, they can no longer be bothered
to do.The future
The grammar of the future is more complex than that of the past or present
tenses. There are several grammatical forms, each with different interpreta-
tions. In English, these forms are not inflectional. The most important one
(the will future) is created with a modal verb. The fact that the main English
future is modal has led some linguists to claim that English has no future
tense. This is certainly true if by “tense” we mean inflected verb forms denot-
ing future situations. However, English has several grammatical means of
indicating futurity.
As you might expect but probably didn’t think to put it quite so oddly,
“the future is what now is prior to” (McCawley 1981: 341), and the gram-
matical future forms locate “situations in time subsequent to the present
moment” (Comrie 1985: 43).
However, the future is conceptually different from the present and the
past. Arguably, there is only one actual past and one actual present, but
there are many futures. There is the future that we have planned, the fu-
ture we predict, the future we wish for, the future that we have to bring
about, and lots of others. And, of course, there is the future that will actu-
ally occur, although, as McCawley remarks, “[t]he notion of ‘actual future’
may give one a queasy feeling, in view of the fact that one has very little
conception of which of the infinitely many possible futures is the actual
one;... Nonetheless, speakers of natural languages frequently indulge