What the present can tell us about the future

Amanda Edmonds (1) , Aarnes Gudmestad

1 EMMA - Etudes montpelliéraines du monde anglophone

This investigation studies the second-language (L2) development of variable future-time expression in French. One hundred and eighteen nonnative speakers at four proficiency levels and 30 native speakers completed a written-contextualized task (WCT), a language-proficiency test and a background questionnaire. The verb form (inflectional future, periphrastic future, and present) selected for each item on the WCT was coded for three independent linguistic factors: presence of a lexical temporal indicator, temporal distance and (un)certainty. Multinomial logistic regression tests and a follow-up analysis of high and low frequency of the present demonstrated that this form plays a complex role in native-speaker variability and is acquired late in contexts of future-time reference for nonnative speakers.

Mots clés: future-time reference; Hexagonal French; L2; variation

Domaines: Linguistique

Amanda Edmonds, Aarnes Gudmestad. What the present can tell us about the future: A variationist analysis of future-time expression in native and nonnative French. Langage, Interaction et Acquisition / Language, Interaction and Acquisition , 2015, 6 (1), pp.15-41. ⟨hal-03063010⟩