1Introduction
Languages differ in whether or not they require speakers to grammatically mark future events.
For example, a German speaker predicting rain can naturally do so in the present tense, saying:
Morgen regnet es which translates to ‘It rains tomorrow’. In contrast, English would require the
use of a future marker like ‘will’ or ‘is going to’, as in: ‘It will rain tomorrow’.
1
In this way, English
requires speakers to encode a distinction between present and future events, while German does
not.
2
Could this characteristic of language influence speakers’ intertemporal choices?
In this paper I test a linguistic-savings hypothesis: that being required to speak in a distinct
way about future events leads speakers to take fewer future-oriente d actions. This hypothesis arises
naturally if grammatically separating the future and the present leads speakers to disassociate the
future from the presen t. This would make the future feel more distant, and since sa ving involves
current costs for future rewards, would make saving harder. On the other hand, some languages
grammatically equate the present and future. Those speakers would be more willing to save for a
future which appears closer. Put another way, I ask whether a habit of speech whic h disassociates
the future from the present, can cause people to devalue future rew ards.
The bulk of this paper investigates whether this prediction is borne out in savings behavior.
To do so, I first review the literature on what linguists call future-time reference (FTR), which
studies both when and how languages require speakers to mark the timing of events. From this
literature I adopt a future-time criterion from typological linguistics, which separates languages into
two broad categories: weak and strong FTR. This criterion separates those languages that require
future events to be grammatically marked when making predictions (strong-FTR languages, like
English), from those that do not (weak-FTR languages, like German).
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By analyzing text samples
extracted from the web, I confirm that this linguistic distinction captures a central tendency of
how languages mark future even ts, and that this distinction can be both generated and verified in
automatically collected data.
I then examine how these linguistic differences correlate with future-oriented behaviors such as
saving, exercising, abstaining from smoking, condom use, retirement savings, and long-run health.
I also attempt to determine if differences in language cause these differences in behavior, or if
non-linguistic traits that are coincident with language explain these correlations. For example,
most (but not all)
4
Germanic languages are weak-FTR: could there also be a “Germanic” savings
value that is widely held b y Germanic-language speakers but not caused by language? While not
conclusive, the evidence does not support the most obvious forms of common causation.
1
These are wh at linguists call periphrastic constructions, in which future events are marked by the addition of
auxiliary words.
2
In English future reference is p ossible without future markers in certain contexts: specifically with scheduled
events or events resulting from law-like properties of the world. See Copley (2009) for details. In my analysis, I set
aside these cases because as shown in Dahl (1985) and Dahl (2000), “in many if not most languages, this kind of
sentence is treate d in a way that do e s not mark it grammatically as having non-present time reference... even for
languages where future-time reference is otherwise highly gramm a ticalized.” In othe r words, how scheduled eve nts
are treated does not reflect a language’s overall treatment of future reference.
3
Specifically, I adopt a criteria which distinguishes between languages w hich Dahl (2000) calls “futureless”, and
those which are not. Dahl defines “futureless” languages as those which d o not require “ the obligatory use [of
grammaticalized future-time reference] in (main clause ) prediction-based contexts”. In this framework, a prediction
is a stateme nt ab out the future that has no intention al component. Predicting the weather would be a can onical
example. See Dahl (2000) and Thieroff (2000) for a discussion of the basis and areal properties of this d istinction.
In the text of this p aper, I adopt Thieroff ’s more neutral language of “weak-FTR” for “futureless” languages, and
denote non-weak-FTR languages as “strong-F TR”. See section 4.1 for details on the EUROTYP criteria developed
by Dahl (2000), App endix B for a discussion of how I apply this criteria to languages not covered by EUROTYP,
and the online Appendix for a complete list of coded languages.
4
Interestingly, English is a notable outlier among Germanic languages. I discuss this at length in section 2.
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