Basic Clause Patternsstate of affairs that will hold in the future; context or adverbials may indicate
when it began or when it will end: He will be here tomorrow from 3 to 4 p.m.
With activity verbs, the future can denote either single or repeated oc-
currences of events. Just which is determined by other parts of the sentence,
such as an object or a temporal adverbial: He will eat a sandwich, He will sing
a song, He will eat sandwiches (every day for the next week, just as he did this
week).
Whether an event recurs regularly and habitually is independent of the
future tense marker. Habituality is indicated by objects or adverbials: I will
be late for class every day next week, I will go to an occasional movie next
year.
Consistent with its denotation of future situations, will may be used for
intentions, predictions, conditions, requests, offers, and promises:
Intentions: I’ll stay for the entire week! We won’t forget to write
to you.
Predictions: You will enjoy good fortune throughout your life.
Conditionals: If the rain continues, the river will overflow its banks.
When the weather warms up, people will throng to
the beaches.
Requests: Will you bring the beer this time?
Offers: I’ll bring the beer, if you want.
Promises: I’ll bring the beer, I promise.
I promise that I’ll be on time next time.
The forms of will can occur in elliptical responses: Will you, Heather, have
this man, Henry, to be your lawful wedded husband? I will. Don’t be late! I
won’t.
Be going to V
Form
This future form is created with the expression be going to followed by the
uninflected form of a verb: Jake is going to leave soon.
If the be is the first auxiliary verb in a tensed clause, it must be inflected
to indicate the person and number of its subject as well as the tense of the
clause. It may be inflected for present or past tense. With the past tense we
create a “future of a past”: John was going to leave, but he missed his plane.
Stylistically, be going to is less formal than will and is more frequent
in conversational than in written English. It is often pronounced [g@n@],