Mfcttrf

Does English have really two tenses-present and past? Some linguists argue that it is Latinate fallacy to think that English has got three tenses.

Some English professors and Even some native speakers do not accept the proposition.

If it is true ,why are the standard grammar books published by Cambridge and Oxford Publications still mentioning the term future tense.Is it not misleading the learners?

Can we call the two sentences given below present continuous?

1.I am working here today.

2.I will be working here tomorrow.

I have doubts regarding others forms
too.

My question is: Does English really have only two tenses.

I hope the answer will be comprehensive.

Does English really have only two tenses.

It depends how you define "tense", but to most linguists, yes.

All languages can mark the time when an event occurs, to any degree of specificity you want. You can say "I played a game", or "I played a game yesterday", or "I played a game at 11:35am on September 4th", and so on.

Linguists generally only call it "tense" (sometimes "morphological tense", though that's not quite the same thing) when this marking is mandatory. For example, if I played a game at 11:35am on September 4th, then "I played a game yesterday" is perfectly correct (as of the time of writing), and "I played a game" is also fine. But that -ed is mandatory for past-tense verbs in English: that part can't be left off. As soon as I switch to "I play a game", the meaning has changed significantly.

And in English, the only mandatory morphological distinction is between past and non-past. It's conventional to use "will" to mark events happening in the future, but you can also have future meanings without it: how about "I'm going to play a game"? Or "after I play this game [I'm going to go get pizza]"? In both cases, the game-playing will happen in the future, but no "will" is required. The only thing that is required is using a non-past form, since the event is non-past: we can't say *"after I played this game [I'm going to go get pizza]". (The star before it is linguistics shorthand for "this isn't valid".)

This is why some languages, like Mandarin, are said to be tenseless. Mandarin is certainly capable of expressing whether an event happens in the past, present, or future. But this marking is not mandatory: it's entirely optional, like whether to include "…yesterday" or "…tomorrow" in English. So linguists say Mandarin has no (morphological) tenses at all.

There is an argument for distinguishing morphological tenses from periphrastic tenses. The English verb “to be” has five morphological tenses:

present: I am

past: I was

present subjunctive: (if) I be

past subjunctive: (if) I were

imperative: be!

Periphrastic tenses combine a form of the verb with a battery of auxiliaries, giving:

present continuous: I am working

past continuous: I was working

future: I shall/will work

future continuous: I shall/will be working

and a lot more.

Your question is basically whether “tense” is a morphological category or a syntactic category. Both positions have their supporters, but the former is neater.

It depends on what you mean by "tense". One thing that goes into making a "tense" is time reference, so the English future qualifies on that basis. The other thing, though, is "grammaticalization", such as affixing a certain morpheme to verbs to form the particular verb form. Compare how past, present and future are constructed in Swahili, Assamese, or Lushootseed where you add certain affixes. If your understanding of "tense" is that it's about verb form, then English doesn't have a future tense. But we can still convey future time reference by adding something in the neighborhood of the verb (an auxiliary like "shall", "will", "may", subordination like "going to" or "intend to", or "about to").