§113:
§5:First, the ways of referring to the future dealt with in this chapter illustrate the point made in §5: that the Present tense, from the semantic point of view as well as syntactically, would be best described as 'non-past'.
I know what he means by "from the semantic point of view", but I do not understand what he means by "syntactically" in this context.However, in English the major formal distinction of Present and Past tenses can be associated with two major TIME ZONES, 'past' and 'non-past', so that future time is subsumed under 'non-past'. This helps to explain why English, which does not have a Future tense as such, uses Present tense to express future time.
So what does it mean when he says that "The Present tense would be syntactically best described as 'non-past'"?