Future Tenses Timeline

Here you have another very helpful entry that will help you out understand the underlying semantic values of some future tenses. As we have been saying since PLEnglishtopia was born, in English, we have many different verbal tenses that will conceptualise in our speech any action or event that we want to talk about.

As a reminder, I would also like to highlight that most of the semantic differences that we spot among these verbal tenses are very small and sometimes their boundaries are quite blurred and difficult to outline.

Throughout this Blog, I have already provided a thorough explanation about the future simple which is the "flagship" - if you allow me say so - of the future in English. Afterwards I have also released a Diagram from trumus.biz which stands for a magnificent resource to grasp a general overview on the different verbal tenses we can use to talk about the future in English.

Now here you have another brilliant visual resource by means of which you will be able to fix in your mind the placement of events and actions in the future and as regards their duration, the right moment when they will take place and their connection to other future events.

These kinds of graphics turn out to be priceless materials to be displayed in class when explaining verbal tenses because, as the old saying goes "a picture - a graphic in this case - is worth a thousand words".

Source: www.linglish.net/2008/12/23/whats-in-a-verb/

Consider now, for instance, the following senteces covering respectively each of the three future tenses (Please, note what the different colours - light blue or peach orange - stand for in the graphic):

1. I will go to the stadium tomorrow.
2. I will be going to the stadium when Joe calls me.
3. I will have gone to the stadium when Zoe comes home.