Pragmatic trends in French future variant selection

Abstract

Using a native speaker context completion task, this study explores the alternation between the periphrastic future, as in je vais chanter, ‘I am going to sing,’ and the inflected future, as in je chanterai ‘I will sing.’ The aim of the context completion task is to further establish the pragmatic functions of the periphrastic and inflected future in Hexagonal French, building upon the results of previous quantitative analyses (e.g. Roberts, 2012; Edmonds and Gudmestad, 2015). The results of the present native speaker questionnaire indicate that the periphrastic future denotes speaker certainty due to an awareness of previous eventualities that positively affect the realization of the future proposition while the inflected future expresses deontic modality through promises and dynamic modality through speaker willingness. Furthermore, this study provides evidence for the importance of context completion tasks not only in determining the pragmatic nature of the future variants but also in testing major trends that emerge from quantitative analyses.