Le futur anterieur et ses emplois : analyse contextuelle

Abstract

The aim of the study is a description of the French tense futur antérieur, which expresses anteriority in relation to another past activity and its other multiple ways of usage resulting from the context in which it is used. In the first part of the study the author presents previous research on futur antérieur and focuses on the manner in which its usage has been described since the 17th century. The second part discusses the tense and aspect issues. Like other complex tenses of the French language, futur antérieur is characterized by ambiguity in terms of aspect : it may express the result of the previous action or indicate a fully finished process. This is why the author adopted the idea of Stanisław Karolak, which allows one to determine the aspect of futur antérieur as non-continuous. The author explains in what way futur antérieur can describe past events and demonstrates that the choice of this tense by the speaker shows some reserve towards the truthfulness of the communicated content or towards the judgment included in the utterance. It may also aim at underlining a quality of the process described. According to the monosemic theory the basic quality of futur antérieur, [+future], is fixed : it interacts with other qualities of the context, [±future] i [±certain], which results in the three basic meanings of futur antérieur, temporal, epistemic, and appreciative. The context may include additional qualities that allow one to express more subtle nuances in terms of meaning. Nine meanings of futur antérieur have been distinguished : temporal, historical, legal, imperative, in stage directions, epistemic, of cohesion, retrospective, and exclamation ones. In the third part the author describes each of these meanings and analyses contextual elements and the factors that influence interpretation of a given usage of futur antérieur. These are, among others, adverbials of time, adverbs, modal particles, non-definite pronouns, interjections, expressions of summary and opposition, comparative structures, negation, verbs expressing judgment, sentence type (interrogatory, exclamation, temporal and relative clauses, and conditionals), subject, aspect of the verb in futur antérieur, occurrence of other tenses, the position of futur antérieur in the text, type of text, and the knowledge that the speaker and the addressee share. In chapter IV the contextual elements distinguished allowed the author to collect the rules of contextual exploration (based on Jean-Pierre Desclés’ theory), which make it possible to automatically determine the meaning of futur antérieur. The automatic identification of meaning is correct in a considerable number of the ways of futur antérieur usage. A correct assessment of the meaning of futur antérieur is more difficult when respective meanings overlap, which occurs especially in literary text.