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In:Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dalila Ayoun, Agnès Celle and Laure Lansari
[Studies in Language Companion Series 197] 2018
► pp. 309–334

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Chapter 14
Phraseological usage patterns of past tenses

A corpus-driven look on French passé composé and imparfait

 | Paderborn University
Published online: 2 August 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.197.14wic
Abstract
This chapter presents a corpus-driven investigation into usage patterns of the French past tenses passé composé and imparfait. Using a new reference corpus of French, the Corpus de référence du français contemporain, and adopting a construction grammar perspective, we analyze past-tense occurrences of two highly frequent polysemous verbs, vouloir ‘want’ and voir ‘see’. Assuming that the two tenses are an alternation phenomenon, collostructions can be identified that differ in terms of their attracted complements. These highly distinctive collexemes indicate phraseological uses of past-tensed verbs whose tense choice is constrained. The results provide further evidence for the inseparability of lexis and grammar and the semantic-pragmatic shifts that are prevalent in past-tense constructions of highly frequent polysemous verbs.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1French past tenses between theoretical and corpus linguistics
    • 2.2Construction grammar, complementation, and the analysis of French past tenses
  • 3.Methodology: Corpus and data analysis
  • 4. Results
    • 4.1Past-tense choice at the semantics-pragmatics interface: The modal verb vouloir
    • 4.2 Between cognition and perception: The verb voir
  • 5. French past-tensed verbs as lexico-grammatical constructions
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (99)
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