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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. 41–64

Chapter 3
The temporal uses of French devoir and Estonian pidama (‘must’)

| University of Tartu
| University of Tartu

Using a parallel corpus, we compare the temporal uses of devoir in French and pidama (‘must’) in Estonian in order to identify possible correspondences in their future time reference. While they share similar properties in their root modality, they differ in their epistemic and postmodal uses. For French, we mostly follow the analysis of Hans Kronning (2001) who distinguishes three types of future-tense uses of devoir: alethic future, “subjective” and “objective” alethic future in the past. Our analysis demonstrates that unlike devoir, pidama does not have the “objective future in the past”. In contrast, the data reveal a high degree of correspondence between the two verbs in the other future-related uses reported for devoir and generally absent in Estonian descriptions.

Keywords: modal verbs, postmodal uses, future, French, Estonian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. The descriptions of the temporal uses of devoir and pidama in previous studies
  • 3.The results of the corpus analysis
    • 3.1Data and method
    • 3.2 The “objective” future in the past
    • 3.3The subjective future in the past
    • 3.4The “alethic future”
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.197.03tre
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