Attenuation in French Simple Tense

Schmid, Hans-Jörg & Susanne Handl (Hgg.): Cognitive Foundations of Linguistic Usage Patterns. Empirical Studies. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter Mouton (= Applications of cognitive linguistics. 13), 195-223., 2010

In French, as in many other languages, past-tense forms of the type ‘I wanted to ask you a question’ can be used to express politeness. This paper addresses a simple question: Are these forms instances of the “normal” past tense, from which the politeness effect is derived ad hoc as an implicature or is politeness a separate, entrenched value of the past-tense forms in question? As will become clear, this problem touches on fundamental issues of synchronic and diachronic linguistics.

ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, 1998

This paper provides a principled explanation of the mechanism of interpreting English tenses in indirect speech complement clauses. To this end, the paper proposes an interpretive principle which is based on two theories: a compositional tense theory and Hirose's (1995, 1997a, 1997b) theory of reported speech. The former theory requires a distinction between the level of tense structure and the level of tense interpretation, on one hand, and a distinction between the absolute and the relative tense component, on the other; the latter theory introduces the notions of public self and private self. It will be shown that the proposed principle can not only solve problems with previous analyses, but also account for a variety of related temporal phenomena in English indirect speech.* * I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Yukio Hirose and Masao Okazaki for giving me invaluable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. I also thank the following people: Yuichi Mori for fruitful discussions; two anonymous EL reviewers for their insightful comments; Joyce Cunningham, Linda Ghan, and Nina Padden for answering my questions about English data and improving my English. All remaining inadequacies are, of course, my own.

2021

The purpose of this paper is to establish that so-called 'uses' of verbal infections such as the French imparfait can articulate a constructional, 'entrenched' dimension, with a context-sensitive, semantic/pragmatic enrichment dimension-i.e., that one type of modelling mechanism (lexical entrenchment vs. dynamic, context-sensitive semantic/pragmatic enrichment). In order to reveal the complexity of the matter at stake, I will here focus on two relatively well-known uses of the imparfait, namely the so-called 'attenuative imparfait' (also known as imparfait de politesse), which associates with utterance conveying polite requests, and the so-called 'narrative imparfait', which associates with sequence-of-events narrative discourses. Until recently (cf. e.g. (Caudal 2017; Patard 2017; Caudal 2018a)), most existing accounts of so-called 'tense uses' put the stress on various kinds of productive, online, semantic and/or pragmatic strategies, to contextually adapt and/or enrich some underspecified 'core' meaning. This was achieved by various mechanisms (semantic composition, discourse structural parameters such as discourse relations or other contextual parameters in general, either purely pragmatic or at the semantics/pragmatics interface), the nature of which do not matter here. However, concerns were soon voiced that this might not a suitable explanation for at least some so-called tense uses. This was notably the case for both the 'attenuative' and 'narrative' uses of the imparfait: thus (Anscombre 2004; Abouda 2004) were the first to observe that the attenuative imparfait looked suspiciously close to a lexified, syntactically entrenched construction. In a similar vein, (Tasmowski-De Rijck 1985), highlighted the syntactic constraints licensing the appearance of so-called 'narrative imparfait' structures-thus suggesting they were conventionalized to some extent. This gave rise to a (still limited) number of novel constructional analyses of some tense uses, and resulted in de facto opposition between 'uses' modelled as being lexicalized constructions (and amenable to a static semantics, in formal terms; cf. e.g. (Patard 2017; Caudal 2018a)), whereas non-constructional uses remain treated as context-sensitive (i.e., non-amenable to a static semantics; they rather required a dynamic semantics/pragmatics approach, conceiving meaning in terms of context update). In this paper, I will question whether or not it is legitimate to view constructionalized 'tense uses' as falling squarely within the realm of static semantics-i.e., whether the above de facto dichotomy has a theoretical basis. Although the present analysis will argue that 'tense uses' are generally the byproduct of some kind of conventionalization process, I will try and demonstrate here that it does not necessarily require all connections to be severed with context-sensitivity qua dynamic semantic and/or pragmatic mechanisms contributing to the interpretation of said 'uses'. By studying the attenuative and narrative uses of the imparfait in turn, I will compare the manner in which context sensitivity plays a different part in each case. I will first (§2) show that although a lexified multidimensional semantics à la (Potts 2005; Gutzmann & McCready 2016) is required to model 'attenuative uses' of the imparfait, a dynamic pragmatic account of the notion of attenuation (qua attenuated directives) based on (Portner 2018)'s theory of commitment management in dialogue is also required to explain their contextual, 'polite request' effects. In contrast to this, discourse structural patterns (i.e. so-called rhetorical relations) will be shown in §3 to play a key role in the emergence of so-called 'narrative imparfait' sequences-even though these also require the presence of some manner of support syntactic markers (in effect, a construction network), as we will see. These different modes of contextualization, I will argue, suggests that the study of so-called tense uses calls for far more diverse and complex approaches at the morpho-syntax to semantics/pragmatics interface than hitherto assumed in the literature.

Journal of Pragmatics, 2011

In this paper we compare the passé compose, the imperfect and the passé simple in French with their presumable equivalents in English: the Present Perfect, the Past Progressive and the Past Simple tense. We show that the proper explanation of the similarities and differences in the usage of these tenses has to be based on three parameters: aspectual instruction of the tense, aspectual constraints it imposes on the ontological nature of the predicates it is combined with, and the relation between the reference point and event point.

Tsukuba English Studies, 2013

Some nonmodal tense forms (e.g. thought) can trigger one or two kinds of modal interpretation, viz. suspended factuality (implicating present counterfactuality) of the complement clause ("I thought you weren't married") or discourse tentativeness ("I thought you might lend me your camera"). The authors explain how this nonmodal use of the past tense – the thinking is represented as a past fact – can lead to one of these modal interpretations of the complement clause. In doing so they discuss various observations in connection with these and other "I though that…"-constructions and similar uses of other past tense and past perfect forms.

Studies in Language 25(3): 463-520, 2001