1The English Present Tense

A characterization of the English present tense should, one would think, be simple and straightforward. What could be more basic than an indication of present time? And what could be simpler morphologically than its typical exponent, namely zero, the absence of any verbal inflection? Yet the English present is notorious for the descriptive problems it poses. Some would even refer to it as “the so-called present tense in English”, so called because a characterization in terms of present time seems hopelessly unworkable. On the one hand, it typically cannot be used for events occurring at the time of speaking. To describe what I am doing right now, I cannot felicitously use sentence (1)(a), with the simple present, but have to resort to the progressive, as in (1)(b). (1)(a) *I write this paper right now. (b) I am writing this paper right now. On the other hand, many uses of the so-called present do not refer to present time at all, but to the future, to the past, or to transcendent situations where time seems irrelevant: (2)(a) My brother leaves for China next month