articles linguistiques
Present/future tense variation in contemporary Italian
The role of settledness
According to normative descriptions of Italian future-framed adverbial clauses, the future tense is the only
option (Quando verrai [F], ti presterò il libro ‘When you come, I’ll lend you the book’).
However, the present tense may also be used (Quando vieni [P], ti presto il libro). I
demonstrate that choice and acceptance of the present in future-framed adverbials are conditioned by the speaker’s presumption of
settledness; that is, in every future world compatible with the speaker’s beliefs the eventuality necessarily occurs. The data
come from an online questionnaire consisting of a forced-choice and an acceptability judgment task completed by 429 native
speakers of Italian, and were analyzed using mixed-effects regression. Results show that the present is chosen most and rated
highest when the future eventuality is presumed settled ([+certain, +immediate, +temporally specific]). These findings demonstrate
that speakers use the present to express confidence in the realization of future eventualities.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Previous literature
- 2.1The Italian present & future tenses
- 2.2Settledness
- 3.Research questions & hypotheses
- 4.Methods
- 5.Results
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Conclusions & future directions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References
Aaron, J.
(
2014):
A certain future: Epistemicity, prediction, and assertion in Iberian Spanish future expression.
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 7,2, pp. 215–240.


Aski, J. & D. Musumeci
(
2014):
Avanti: Beginning Italian, 3rd edn. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Bates, D., M. Maechler, B. Bolker, & S. Walker
(
2015):
Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4.
Journal of Statistical Software, 67,1, pp. 1–48.


Battaglia, S. & V. Pernicone
(
1957):
La grammatica italiana, 2nd edn. Torino: Loescher editore.

Bazzanella, C.
(
1994):
Le facce del parlare. Un approccio pragmatico all’italiano parlato. Firenze: La Nuova Italia.

Berretta, M.
(
1990):
Il futuro in italiano L2.
Quaderni di Dipartimento di Linguistica e Letterature Comparate dell’Università di Bergamo, 61, pp. 147–188.

Berretta, M.
(
1994):
Il futuro italiano nella varietà colloquiale e nella varietà di apprendimento.
Zeitschrift für romanische philologie, 110,1/2, pp. 1–36. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

Berruto, G.
(
2000):
Sociolingustica dell’italiano contemporaneo, 9th edn. Rome: Carocci editore.

Bertinetto, P. M.
(
1986):
Tempo, aspetto e azione nel verbo italiano: Il sistema dell’indicativo. Florence: Presso L’accademia della Crusca.

Bonomi, A. & F. Del Prete
(
2008):
Evaluating future-tensed sentences in changing contexts. Unpublished manuscript, University of Milan.

Calboli, G. & G. Moroni
(
1989):
Grammatica italiana. Bologna: Edizioni Calderini.

Comrie, B.
(
1985):
Tense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Copley, B.
(
2002):
The semantics of the future. PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

D’Achille, P.
(
2003):
L’italiano contemporaneo. Bologna: Il Mulino.

D’Agostino, M.
(
2007):
Sociolinguistica dell’Italia contemporanea. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Danesi, M.
(
2006):
Complete Italian Grammar Review. : Barron.

Dahl, Ö.
(
1985):
Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Blackwell.

De Rôme, D. & P. Tite
(
2003):
Soluzioni! A practical guide to Italian grammar. Malta: McGraw-Hill.

Fleischman, S.
(
1982):
The future in thought and language: Diachronic evidence from Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gravano, A., S. Benus, J. Hirschberg, E. Sneed German, & G. Ward
(
2008):
The effect of contour type and epistemic modality on the assessment of speaker certainty, in
Barbosa, P.,
S. Madureira, &
C. Reis (eds.),
Proceedings of speech prosody 2008. Campinas, pp. 401–404.

Giannakidou, A. & A. Mari
(
2018):
A unified analysis of the future as epistemic modality: The view from Greek and Italian.
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 36,1, pp. 85–129.


Graziano, C.
(
2008):
Italian verbs and essentials ofgrammar, 2nd edn. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Hoff, M.
(
2019):
Settledness & mood alternation: A semantic-pragmatic analysis of Spanish future-framed adverbials. The Ohio State University: PhD thesis.

Hoff, M. & S. Schwenter
(
2019):
Settledness and morphosyntactic variation across Romance. Presented at the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), University of Georgia, May 1–4.
Hothorn, T., K. Hornik, & A. Zeilis
(
2006):
Unbiased recursive partitioning: A conditional inference framework.
Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 15,3, pp. 651–674.


Kaufmann, S.
(
2002):
The presumption of settledness.
CLS, 381, pp. 313–328.

Kaufmann, S.
(
2005):
Conditional truth and future reference.
Journal of Semantics, 221, pp. 231–280.


King, R. & T. Nadasdi
(
2003):
Back to the future in Acadian French.
Journal of French Language Studies, 131, pp. 323–337.


Kuznetsova, A., P. B. Brockhoff, & R. H. B. Christensen
(
2017):
lmerTest package: Tests in linear mixed effects models.
Journal of Statistical Software, 82,13, pp. 1–26.


Lepschy, A. & G. Lepschy
(
1977):
The Italian language today. London: Hutchinson.

Maiden, M. & C. Robustelli
(
2007):
A reference grammar of modern Italian, 2nd edn. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Nanni-Tate, P.
(
2012):
Italian Grammar Drills, 2nd edn. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Peyronnel, S. & I. Higgins
(
2005):
Basic Italian: A grammar and workbook. New York: Routledge.


Poplack, S. & N. Dion
(
2009):
Prescription vs. praxis: The evolution of future temporal reference in French.
Language, 85,3, pp. 557–587.


Poplack, S. & E. Malvar
(
2006):
Elucidating the transition period in linguistic change: The expression of the future in Brazilian Portuguese.
Probus, 191, pp. 121–169.

Proudfoot, A. & F. Cardo
(
2005):
Modern Italian grammar: A practical guide, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge.

R Core Team
(
2017):
R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.

Renzi, L. & G. Salvi
(eds.) (
1991):
Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol. 21. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Rohlfs, G.
(
1969):
Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti: Sintassi e formazione delle parole. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore.

Sabatini, F.
(
1985):
“L’italiano dell’uso medio”: una realtà tra le varietà linguistiche italiane, in
Holtus, G. &
E. Radtke (eds.),
Gesprochenes Italienisch in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Tübingen: G. Narr, pp. 154–184.

Schütze, C. & J. Sprouse
(
2014):
Judgment data, in Podesva,
R. & D. Sharma (eds.),
Research methods in linguistics. New York: Cambridge Univeristy Press, pp. 27-50.


Schwenter, S.
(
1999):
Pragmatics of conditional marking: Implicature, Scalarity, & Exclusivity. New York/London: Garland Publishing.

Serianni, L.
(
1988):
Grammatica italiana: Italiano comune e lingua letteraria. Torino: Utet Libreria.

Tagliamonte, S. & H. Baayen
(
2012):
Models, forests, and trees of York English: Was-were variation as a case study for statistical practice.
Language Variation and Change 24,2, pp. 135–178.


Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Schwenter, Scott A. & Mark R. Hoff
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 march 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.