Future meaning in German and English linguacultures: Comparative analysis

The article presents a comparative analysis of the means expressing future meaning in German and English. The analysis is carried out taking into account the semantics of these means and using data on their historical development. The material of the study was the literary texts of modern authors - the novel by the British writer J. Moyes Me Before You and the German writer C. Hein Landnahme. Grammatical and lexico-grammatical means explicating future semantics in direct speech were extracted from these texts by continuous sampling. The total number of analysed linguistic means from both languages was 2912. The comparative method, methods of component, distributive and contextual analysis were used as the main research methods. Comparison of linguistic means that make up the field of futurity in German and English reveals a number of significant common features, most likely due to the close relationship of the languages. Similarities include semantic and formal correlations between the following grammatical indicative pairs of forms, in which the expression of the future is the main meaning: Future Indefinite and Futur I, Future Perfect and Futur II. Forms with a secondary meaning of the future - Present Indefinite and Prasens, on the one hand, Present Perfect and Perfekt, on the other, - also correlate with each other. Similarities are demonstrated by the forms of the subjunctive mood. So, the most significant representatives of this mood in the field of futurity correlate in the semantic and formal terms - the English pairs of forms would + Infinitive and Past Subjunctive and the German Konditionalis I and Praterit Konjunktiv. In both languages, the imperative mood is represented by imperative forms with similar functionality. At the lexico-grammatical level, similarities are observed in the future use of constructions with modal verbs, on the one hand, and the constructions have + to + Infinitive and haben + zu + Infinitive, be + to + Infinitive and sein + zu + Infinitive, on the other. Both languages are united by the correlation of let + infinitive and lassen + infinitive constructions to express imperative semantics. The differences between the languages show that in English the repertoire of means with future semantics is wider than in German due to the presence of grammatical forms with aspectual characteristic - Future Continuous and Present Continuous, as well as the lexico-grammatical construction be going + to + Infinitive with rather wide semantic functionality. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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