Future Tense in Jaffna Tamil: Based on Comrie's Point of View

Abstract

There are different types of tense systems in languages of the World. In Tamil language, morphologically there are three tenses namely: Present, Past and Future tense. According to Comrie's views, tenses are categorized as Absolute tense and Relative tense. Relative tense has two sub categories as pure relative tense and absolute relative tense. Absolute and relative tenses described in Comrie's theory are found in Tamil language: Present, past future, present progressive, past progressive, future progressive. Still tense and not-yet tenses are functioned as absolute tenses. Absolute tense means that all events are related to the present moment (time of speaking). Its reference point for the location of situation is present moment. The aim of this study is to identify the special features of future tense in Tamil language and different usages of future tense in Tamil language. This research involves descriptive method. Primary data was collected from the informants of the Jaffna Tamil native speakers through the participant observation method. Secondary data of this research were collected from related novels and books. Collected data was analysed using structural analysis and thematic analysis method. The findings revealed that future tense has special features. In Jaffna Spoken Tamil, more future tense aspects are expressed than in Comrie's views. Comrie mainly analyses the aspect of future tense of English and other languages. However, according to Comrie's theory, future tense aspects agree with Jaffna spoken Tamil. As far as Tamil is concerned, in spoken context,, the future time reference, the time adverbs, present tense forms, future suffixes and whole sentence meanings indicate the future time reference.