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Variation and change in future temporal reference with avoir and être

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2020

Anna Tristram Open the ORCID record for Anna Tristram [Opens in a new window]
Anna Tristram*
Affiliation:
Queen’s University Belfast
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Variation and change in the future temporal reference (FTR) sector in French has been the subject of numerous studies, from a variety of perspectives. Most studies consider the patterns of variation and evidence for change by looking at the verbal system as a whole. However, there are indications that some verbs differ significantly in their preference for one or other variant. Avoir and être are two such verbs. This study first examines the overall distribution of the inflected and periphrastic future with these two verbs in the ESLO corpus of spoken French, and considers the evidence for change. A multivariate analysis of the linguistic factors affecting variant selection in FTR with these two verbs reveals no exceptional effects; we thus explore other possible explanations for the exceptional distribution of FTR variants with these two verbs.

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Article
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 25 - 49
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Professor Janice Carruthers and Professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper, as well as audiences at the Association of French Language Studies conference in June 2016 at Queen’s University Belfast and the DIA V conference in September 2018 at the Université Paris Nanterre, and three anonymous reviewers. All remaining errors are of course my own.

References

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