Attenuation in French simple tenses

Among the different usages of verbal tenses that are generally identified, grammarians usually name the modal polite use of some verbal forms. In such usages, a tense occurs in the place of a present tense to produce politeness : (1) I THOUGHT / WAS THINKING about asking you to dinner. (Fleischman, 1989 : 8) (2) DID you want to see me about something ? (ibidem) We may call this effect attenuation as politeness results from the fact that the tense attenuates the directness of statements or questions.

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.

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

Journal of French Language Studies, 2003

Journal of French Language Studies, 1991

The acquisition of English verbal morphology has been mostly tested as a second language (L2) in English-speaking settings (only one cross-sectional study with native speakers of French in a foreign/L2 setting in Quebec , and never with French speakers living in France, who have much less exposure to English than their Francophone counterparts living in Quebec. The present cross-sectional study analyzes data from a group of 21 high school French speakers learning English in France to address two main research questions: (a) Do our learners exhibit nativelike performance in their use of the various past morphological forms across the lexical aspectual classes (e.g., Vendler, 1957/1967)? (b) Does their first language lead French speakers to overuse the English present perfect due to its morphological similarity with the passé composé? Our findings underscore the effect of lexical aspect on the use of past tense markers while highlighting a significant departure from the predicted developmental path of past tense marking: States are marked more consistently than telic events in the narrative task. Possible theoretical and methodological factors that might account for the present findings are discussed.

French and German pupils and 90 Catalan pupils llged 10, /2 and 14 produced each a fairy-tail, a short news item and a letter. The analysisof tense subsystem alternations in these texts reveals: a) that the factors explaining alternations are the same in the observed languages; b) that in some cases, alternations are errors induced by the difficulty to master different enunciative levels in the text; c) that mosi altemations create sense effects in relation to text structure, but since very often no other linguistic unit reinforces the effect created, il may lead to some ambiguity for the receiver. Nonetheless, the results show that alternation of tense subsystem can be seen as an emerging textual competence.

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.

Journal of Pragmatics, 2014

The paper investigates the connection between past tense and modality in six Romance and Germanic languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, English and German). I first argue for an aspecto-temporal definition of imperfects and preterits based on the notion of 'reference point' (R) and I suggest that the different interpretations of past tenses (including the modal ones) reflect specific instantiations of R as 'topic time', 'aspectual vantage point' or 'epistemic evaluation'. Second, I offer a classification and analysis of the modal uses of the imperfects and preterits observed in the languages under investigation. Finally, I expand on the idea that the modal interpretations of past tenses correspond to pragmatic inferences that are being conventionalised and mirror the stages of 'bridging contexts' and 'switch contexts' described in Heine's (2002) model for semantic change. T