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Texting the future in Belgium and Québec: Present matters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2019

Mireille Tremblay ,
Hélène Blondeau  and
Emmanuelle Labeau
Mireille Tremblay*
Affiliation:
Université de Montréal
Hélène Blondeau
Affiliation:
University of Florida
Emmanuelle Labeau
Affiliation:
Aston University
*
Corresponding author. Email: mireille.tremblay.4@umontreal.ca
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Abstract

This study investigates the variation in the expression of Future Temporal Reference in text messages in Belgian and Québécois French. Three variants are considered: the Futurate Present, the Synthetic Future and the Analytic Future. The results of multivariate analyses show that the use of the Futurate Present does not appear to be subject to dialectal variation: both communities use this variant at similar rates, and the use of the variant is constrained by the same linguistic factors. The two dialects show differences in their choice of the Synthetic vs the Analytic Future. Unlike Québécois French, Belgian French strongly favours the Synthetic Future. The two dialects also differ with respect to the linguistic constraints in effect. Our analysis shows the need to explore the relationship between variants, and to distinguish between Covert T (realized as Present tense) and Overt T (either Synthetic or Analytic Future). Our results point toward the hybrid nature of text messages: while our results show patterns of use in line with oral/conversational corpora as reflected by the dialectal variation observed, text messages are not exempt from the influence of written French, as shown by the use of Synthetic Future forms in affirmative sentences in the Québec corpus.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 73 - 98
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by SSHRC research grant (430-2015-00497) Variation et diglossie en français québécois (P.I. M. Tremblay). Thanks to our research assistants, Adèle Aubin and Francis L. Carreau, our colleagues, Patrick Drouin and Philippe Langlais, for the use of the corpus Texto4science, and George Waine for proofreading the paper. For discussion and feedback, we also wish to thank the audiences at CVC8 (U. Ottawa), séminaire OLST-RALI (U. Montréal), LSRL 2017 (U. Delaware), AFLS (Queen’s U.), Les français d’ici (U. St-Boniface), Français parlé dans les médias (Aston U.), as well as Philip Comeau, Raymond Mougeon, Sali Tagliamonte, and the anonymous reviewers. All remaining errors are entirely our own.

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