The futurity of the present and the modality of the future: a commentary on Broekhuis and Verkuyl

In this commentary, I address two aspects of Broekhuis and Verkuyl’s (2013) paper Binary Tense and Modality, pertaining to the analysis of the present and the future. Broekhuis and Verkuyl propose an analysis of the morphological present in Dutch as a prospective interval allowing reference to times after the speech time. This renders the Dutch auxiliary zullen redundant as a future marker—and relegates its function to the realm of epistemic modality. The present-as-interval analysis extends to Greek and beyond, but I show that additional language-systemic constrains are needed to precisely specify when a particular present form will be allowed to future-shift, and whether it designates a present or a nonpast. The epistemic use of the future forms is also supported crosslinguistically, as can be seen in recent discussions on the Greek and Italian future words (Giannakidou 2012; Giannakidou and Mari 2012, 2013). I present examples from Greek and Italian showing that future morphemes crosslinguistically induce commitment weakening, and are therefore very similar to modal particles in Dutch and German (Zimmermann 2011) which appear to have exactly the same effect.