Forthcoming: Futures of the past: The diachrony of future constructions across languages

Stefan Hartmann (ed), Lena Schnee (ed)

Synopsis

Thinking of and talking about future events is a crucial part of our everyday lives. Thus, it is not surprising that in the languages of the world, a variety of markers for future time reference has developed. The goal of this volume is to take a contrastive perspective on the evolution of future constructions by bringing together scholars working on different languages and language families. In doing so, the edited volume opens up new perspectives on long-standing questions regarding the diachronic development of future constructions across languages, with implications not only for research on tense-aspect-mood systems but also for research on grammaticalization and language change more generally.

Chapters

  • Introduction
    Stefan Hartmann, Lena Schnee
  • Expressing future reference in Middle Low German
    Sarah Ihden, Lena Schnee
  • Constructional template or competitor?
    Revisiting the relation between German werden + Infinitive and werden + Present Participle based on new datasets
    Lena Schnee, Stefan Hartmann
  • German werden-future
    A case of failed grammaticalization?
    Elena Smirnova
  • The future that did not happen
    On the history of the verb varda in Swedish
    Dominika Skrzypek
  • The future that may still be
    The spread of blir å INF in contemporary Norwegian
    Olaf Mikkelsen, Dylan Glynn
  • The expression of future in the past in Old and Middle High German
    Svetlana Petrova, Yen-Chun Chen
  • The entanglement of grammaticalization and hypoanalysis in the rise of futures in Slavic languages
    Björn Wiemer
  • Hypoanalysis and aspectual diversification
    The Armenian future in diachrony
    Robin Meyer
  • Grammaticalization of future markers in Korean
    Seongha Rhee
  • Grammaticalization of future markers in Thai
    Kultida Khammee
  • West Polesian future tense constructions switch roles
    Kristin Roncero

Biographies

Stefan Hartmann, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

Stefan Hartmann is professor of German linguistics at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany. His main research focus is the empirical investigation of language dynamics (acquisition, change, evolution) from a usage-based point of view.

Lena Schnee, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Universität Hamburg

Lena Schnee is a PhD student in German linguistics at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and a researcher at Hamburg University. Her PhD thesis examines the alternation between future constructions in modern German using a specially created corpus of recent online texts.

Published

July 8, 2025
LaTeX source on GitHub

Online ISSN

2943-064X

Print ISSN

2943-0550
Cite as
Hartmann, Stefan & Schnee, Lena (eds.). Forthcoming. Futures of the past: The diachrony of future constructions across languages. (Advances in Historical Linguistics). Berlin: Language Science Press.

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.