L’effet de la (ir)régularité verbale sur le choix de variante du futur en français L2

Abstract

The current study considers the use of various grammatical structures expressing the future tense by 10 intermediate French learners. We examine the effect of the verbal paradigm – regular versus irregular – on the learners’ preferred structure in order to determine if they prefer the periphrastic construction, particularly when it comes to irregular verbs. We predicted that the learners’ use of the simple future depended on their ability to correctly conjugate verbs in simple future, meaning that learners who had more difficulties with this variant would use it less often. However, results show that learners used the simple future equally, and as often, with both regular and irregular verbs and that they preferred the periphrastic construction with both verb types. In fact, even those learners with the highest scores on a verb conjugation test targeting the simple future preferred the periphrastic future. We argue that this preference for the periphrastic future is either due to the influence of the learners’ L1 or to the fact that the periphrastic future is an analytic construction, making it cognitively simpler.