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Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dalila Ayoun, Agnès Celle and Laure Lansari
[Studies in Language Companion Series 197] 2018
► pp. 19–40

Chapter 2
A quantitative perspective on modality and future tense in French and German

| Université de Neuchâtel

This chapter looks at modal nuances conveyed by future tenses in French (futur simple, futur antérieur) and German (Futur I, Futur II) via a corpus-based study, using comparable newspaper corpora (Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung). In addition to a qualitative analysis based on an enunciative approach to modal forms (Rossari 2016), we will adopt a quantitative perspective in order to elicit statistical evidence on the nature and degree of modality expressed by the future tense in daily newspapers. Besides the fact that modal use of future tenses is rather rare in both languages compared to their temporal use, the quantitative analysis shows that French appears to have a more modal use of future tense than German in the text type sampled.

Keywords: modality, future tense, French, German, corpus study, quantitative analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Qualitative analysis
    • 2.1Representation of future tense uses
    • 2.2Future tense in French and German
      • 2.2.1 Temporal use of future tense
      • 2.2.2Modal use of future tense
  • 3.Quantitative analysis
    • 3.1 Corpora and procedures
    • 3.2Quantitative data
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.197.02hut
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