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Part of
Evidence for Evidentiality
Edited by Ad Foolen, Helen de Hoop and Gijs Mulder
[Human Cognitive Processing 61] 2018
► pp. 199–226

Chapter 8
The French future

Evidentiality and incremental information

| Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS/ENS/EHESS

We propose a new analysis for the French future, which treats it as a modal-evidential, articulating two perspectival points – a conjectural and a ratificational one. Considering that future also contributes a relative tense, we explain a variety of uses covering previously unexplained cases, including those in which the speaker knows that the prejacent is true. Finally, our account sheds some light on cross-linguistic facts and most notably on the relation between the ratificational French future and the conjectural future in Italian (akin to an epistemic modal), paving the way for a typological distinction between two types of languages: ‘conjectural future type’ languages and ‘ratificational future type’ ones.

Keywords: epistemic modality, future, perspective, ratification
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Disentangling future from epistemic modality
  • 3.The temporal and the ‘present ratification’ use
    • 3.1 fut and past, scoping relations and relative tense
    • 3.2Temporal and present ratification uses: truth conditions, inferences and direct evidence constraint
      • 3.2.1The truth conditional dimension
      • 3.2.2Deriving the inference of ignorance
    • 3.3The direct evidence constraint of ratificational modals
    • 3.4First set of predictions
  • 4.Epistemic reading
    • 4.1The epistemic interpretation of future with past
    • 4.2Summary
  • 5.Synchronic and cross-linguistic variation: the epistemic interpretation of simple future sentences
    • 5.1Conjectural future and the competition with ‘devoir’
    • 5.2Synchronic variation with eventives: a new hypothesis
    • 5.3A note on cross-linguistic variation
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.61.09mar
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