Will: tense or modal or both?

Abstract

Most grammarians refuse to treatwillas a marker of future tense in English. We examine the arguments against treatingwillas a tense and find them weak; the arguments in favour of treating it as a modal also turn out to be poor. We argue thatwillshould be treated as a marker of future tense, and that its so-called modal uses are either not modal or have independent explanations. The one exception is the volitional use ofwill: to account for this, we propose that willingness is a semantic relic from an earlier meaning of the word.