Page 164 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

150 CHAPTER 7
The switch time markers can take many forms, such as adverbs and phrases (e.g., now/then, today/at that time, currently/in thepast, in today's society/in the early days) as well as adjectives (e.g., new/old, recent/past, cur- rent/previous/early) or even other verbs with a different tense.
However, academic texts required of students in some disciplines, such as history and philosophy, seem to be somewhat more prone to the uses of the past tense than those in the natural sciences, political science, psychology, sociology, or economics.
Like the list of verbs employed predominantly in the present tense, the list of specific verbs that occur mostly in the past tense is also very limited.
Verbs Predominantly Used in the Past Tense
bend lean remark set off turn away bow light reply shake wrap
(Adapted from Biber et al., 1999)
THE FUTURE-TENSE FUNCTIONS AND USES
The future tense marks the future time that follows now. The future tense is marked by auxiliary verbs will or going to + the base (infinitive) form of the main verb (see a brief discussion in the Infinitive section of this chapter; e.g., will sell, will determine). Another common means of marking the future is the employment of the present tense in conjunction with future time adverbials (e.g., tomorrow, next month, in 2015). The usage of the present simple tense to refer to future activities is particularly prevalent with subor- dinate clauses of time and condition marked by such conjunctions as if, whether, when, before (e.g., The interest rates will rise when the Federal Reserve Board approves the new fiscal policy).
When teaching the uses of the future tense, it is important to em- phasize at the outset that future-tense markers are never used in clauses of time and condition and constructions such as *when the Fed- eral Reserve will increase theprime rate result in ungrammatical and ob- viously non-native sentences (see chap. 10 for further and more emphatic discussion).
The general function of the future tense is to refer to future actions, events, or states. However, the meaning of the future tense expressed either by means of the auxiliary verb will or the simple present tense represents "a marked future of unusual definiteness, attributing to the future the degree of certainty" usually associated with the present and the past (Quirk et al.,
TLFeBOOK