La valeur «temporelle» du futur simple français et ses répartitions dans un corpus économique de presse

Abstract

This article examines the enunciative conditions of the French simple Future in its temporal value. In particular, starting from the observation that cotextual and contextual markers play an essential role in interpreting verbal tenses, the temporal value of French simple Future will be analyzed through elements which could influence the enunciative situation (KERBRAT-ORECCHIONI 1980 ; 2002), such as verbal persons, adverbial markers, and phrase types where the simple Future appears. The semantic values of simple Future are inspired to Rocci’s analysis (2005). Actually, he divides the simple Future values into two main interpretations: the descriptive one, which concerns temporality, and the “metarepresentative” one, expressing modality. Nevertheless, our analysis is strictly based on the peculiarities of our corpus and this is the reason why some specifications have been added to Rocci’s approach.
Our corpus is composed of 2300 texts and 643236 tokens. It has been collected from the economy section of Le Figaro from 1st January to 28th February, 2007. Quantitative analysis will consist in searching simple Future occurrences expressing temporality, whereas qualitative analysis will deal with the observation of a “prediction range” in terms of pure prediction, conditioned prediction, prophetic prediction and announcement, in the aim of describing the temporal value of this verbal tense in economic discourse of popularization.