Some Issues in the Metalinguistic Representation of French Tense and Aspect

Abstract

Just over a decade ago, Catherine Fuchs and Anne-Marie Léonard (henceforth, F and L) co-authored Vers une théorie des aspects (Fuchs and Léonard 1979), a monograph on the tense and aspect systems of French and English. Although fairly influential among French linguists, their work has been largely ignored by scholars outside France. There is nothing surprising in this: indeed, the theoretical framework chosen by F and L, namely Antoine Culioli’s théorie des opérations énonciatives (‘theory of speaker-based operations’), has hitherto met with much the same fate. I do not wish to go into the epistemological, cultural or attitudinal reasons for this state of affairs. The scope of the present article is actually very restricted. My purpose will be to delineate, in deliberately informal terms, some of the critical problems that are to be encountered by anyone attempting to construct a formalized or semi-formalized representation of French tense and aspect. F and L’s book happens to be such an attempt, certainly the most explicit and comprehensive one in recent years.