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Article published In: Diachronica
Vol. 32:4 (2015) ► pp.530–570

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Venir de (+ infinitive)

An immediate anteriority marker in French

 | University of Montpellier
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 10 March 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.32.4.03bre
This paper deals with the grammaticalisation of venir into an aspectual auxiliary of immediate anteriority, against the traditional approach (Gougenheim 1971 [1929]) according to which venir de + inf, would express recent past and so would be a temporal auxiliary. On the basis of the (revised) Reichenbachian model, it shows that venir de + inf bears upon the relationship between R and E (aspect) and not on the relationship between R and S (time). This analysis explains why venir, in this periphrasis, is defective (i.e., why venir cannot be conjugated in the passé simple or in any compound tense).
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