Patterns and alternant structures for future time reference in Gallo-Romance: functional-systemic challenges for a grammaticalization account.

The central aim of the project is to investigate the alternation and competition between the use of the simple future tense paradigm (je chanterai), periphrastic future-marking structures (je vais chanter) and the future-signaling present tense (je chante ce soir) in the three branches of Gallo-Romances, viz. French (both the standard language and Northern French dialect varieties), Francoprovençal, and Occitan. Our database contains materials from extant written and spoken sources and from newly compiled fieldwork surveys. The statistical analysis of the corpus measures the impact of a series of system-based (viz. the syntactic and semantic-referential context), social (viz. age, education and gender of the informants), and dialect-geographical variables on the selection of future time reference formulae. The statistical output is evaluated against the background of currently prevailing approaches in historical and cognitive linguistics. More in particular, we verify the applicability of the notions and concepts of (de)grammaticalization, exaptation, subjectification and metaphorization to the evolution of future temporal expression in Gallo-Romance. The working hypothesis underlying the research is that the selection between the different variants for expressing futurity isnot random, but functionally motivated; co-determined by geo-linguistic and social parameters.

Keywords:Future time expression, Morpho-syntax, Gallo-Romance, Historical linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Cognitive linguistics, Grammaticalization, Subjectification

Disciplines:Dentistry