Facing the future together: French and English in contrast

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceeding with ISSN or ISBNConference contribution with ISSN or ISBNpeer-review

Abstract

Main claim: The French Future Inflection (FFI) and English will are both markers of future tense, with identical semantics. Evidence: In a translation corpus, 83.9% of instances of FFI had as their translation equivalent either will or shall or ‘ll. In the other direction, 73.7% of instances of will corresponded to FFI. Argument 1: It is possible that the superficial translation equivalence in most cases hides a difference in meaning: FFI and will could reach the same interpretation via different routes. The null hypothesis, however, is that they are identical in meaning. Argument 2: To maintain the null hypothesis, the instances of non-equivalence need to be accounted for. We do exactly this for the main types.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCongrès Mondial de Linguistique Française - CMLF 2010
Place of PublicationParis
PublisherInstitut de Linguistique Française
Pages1787-1798
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)9782759805341
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 12 Jul 2010
EventCongrès Mondial de Linguistique Française - CMLF 2010 - New Orleans, USA, 12-15 July 2010
Duration: 12 Jul 2010 → …

Conference

ConferenceCongrès Mondial de Linguistique Française - CMLF 2010
Period12/07/10 → …

Bibliographical note

© Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2010. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Facing the future together: French and English in contrast'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this