O FUTUR TEM FUTURO NO FRANCÊS (CANADENSE)?

Abstract

The hospitality of the future temporal reference sector to multiple exponents is well exemplified by French, where the inflected future (IF) currently competes with both periphrastic future (PF) and futurate present (P) forms. Most scholars contend that the variant expressions are selected according to distinctions in the way the speaker envisions the future eventuality and/or the semantic and/or pragmatic import s/he wishes to convey. Curiously, however, there is little agreement as to what that import is nor which of the variants is capable of expressing it. Making use of a variationist approach, in this paper we return to the question of the function and meaning of the major exponents of futurity in spoken French through systematic analysis of thousands of contexts of future temporal reference in natural speech. We show that although the variant forms continue to divide up the work of expressing posteriority, they are rarely selected by speakers in accordance with the values commonly attributed to them in either the descriptive or prescriptive literature. This is because basically all reference to future states or events is made by PF, which has ousted IF from virtually all contexts of productive usage but one, while P has made only incipient incursions into another. We suggest that failure to attain consensus on the set of meanings or functions distinguishing the variants is the product of an epistemologicalproblem stemming from difficulty in reconciling the form-function polyvalence characteristic of inherent variability with the (distributional) linguistic enterprise of ascribing a unique function to every form