Sémantique du passé composé en français moderne et exploration des rapports passé composé / passé simple dans un corpus de moyen français

Denis Apothéloz (1)

1 ATILF - Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française

This article aims to offer new insights regarding the analysis and the history of the French passé composé. In particular, it reexamines the claim that this tense has become an aorist. The author begins by stating his vision of the passé composé's semantics, paying particular attention to its resultative property. The core element is the concept of factuality. Three types of factuality in discourse are distinguished, one of them being the experiential type (i.e. the "experiential perfect"). The final part of the article is an empirical study where the uses of passé simple and passé composé in P. de Commynes' Mémoires (Middle French) are compared. The competition between the two tenses in certain types of factual utterances is highlighted, as well as how set phrases have helped keep the passé simple in use.

Mots clés: French passé composé and passé simple; experiential perfect; factual sentence; resultativity; superlativity

Domaines: Linguistique

Denis Apothéloz. Sémantique du passé composé en français moderne et exploration des rapports passé composé / passé simple dans un corpus de moyen français. Pierre-Don Giancarli, Marc Fryd. Aoristes et parfaits en français, latin, corse, estonien et polonais, 28, Brill; Rodopi, pp.199-246, 2016, Cahiers Chronos, 978-90-04-31338-05. ⟨10.1163/9789004313408_011⟩. ⟨hal-01132723⟩