Variation and change in the French
temporal reference system
ASSOCIATION OF FRENCH LANGUAGE
STUDIES CONFERENCE, JUNE 2016
DR ANNA TRISTRAM
SCHOOL OF MODERN LANGUAGES
QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY BELFAST
Overview
 Context and scope of this study
 Previous studies
 Methodology
 Results
 Interim conclusions
Future temporal reference
 Inflected Future (IF):
 Orléans plus que partout étant donné que c'est une université
jeune on aura de la place (1268)
 Periphrastic Future (PF):
 puis on va avoir un petit soleil là (FJ30)
 Futurate Present (P):
 oui c'est demain demain demain qu'y a la grève des de l'EDF
(ML533)
 NB Other uses of future tense morphology excluded:
e.g. habitual, spatial, gnomic, hypothetical...
Examples
Previous studies
 Canadian French
 Laurentian varieties
(Montreal; Ottawa-Hull)





PF > IF
(Slow) diachronic change
IF no longer productive
Negative contexts ONLY
BUT: Age-grading effects?
(Blondeau 2006; Poplack & Turpin 1999; Poplack & Dion 2009; Wagner & Sankoff 2011)
Previous studies
 Acadian varieties
(PEI, NF)
IF still productive
 Different constraining
factors (not negation)
 Conservative

 France?
 Few studies
 None diachronic
 Indications: PF also
preferred?
 Factors: negation + ?
(King & Nadasdi 2003; Roberts 2012)
Research questions
 What is the distribution of IF and PF in the French of
France?
 Is there any evidence for diachronic change, and in
which direction?
 How does this compare to findings for other
varieties?
 What is the influence of linguistic and social factors
identified in previous literature on this variation?
Methodology
 ESLO Corpus of spoken French
 Recordings from 1968 and 2008
REAL-TIME
DIACHRONIC DATA
 Transcribed with access to sound files
 Metadata on speakers’ social characteristics
 Search interface with various selection parameters
Methodology
 Focus on AVOIR and ETRE
 (Theoretical and methodological motivations)
 Factors considered:
Linguistic
Social
Sentential polarity
Proximity
Phrases
(Adverbial modification,
contingency; ‘quand’; grammatical
person; T/V)
Age
Gender
Education level
Socio-economic status (SES)
Factors
 Sentential polarity
 (Most) Canadian studies – categorical
 Less important for French of France? (Roberts 2012)
PF = proximal
 Proximity
IF = distal
 Prescriptive works – cited as main (only?) factor
 The search for form-function symmetry… (Poplack & Dion 2009)
 Phrases
 Locutions with avoir: avoir besoin, avoir X ans, avoir lieu, …
 Categorical behaviour?
(Other factors NS, including all sociolinguistic factors; not discussed further here)
DATA & RESULTS
Results: categorical contexts
IF
Corpus
PF
Polarity
Positive
n
95
%
76.0%
n
30
%
24.0%
Total
n
125
Negative
27
100.0%
0
0.0%
27
Positive
55
59.1%
38
40.9%
93
Negative
16
88.9%
2
11.1%
18
Total
193
73.4%
70
26.6%
263
1968
2008
(1) à partir du moment où on fait une deuxième ligne sur cette euh agglo il faut
faire un même procédé parce qu'on a une usine d'entretien qui est à la Source
on va pas avoir un deuxième système on va en avoir ici mais c'est juste pour le
nettoyage et le petit entretien (ESLO-2_HV753)
(2) je j'ai su y a deux jours que en fait le transport euh on on va pas avoir de
transports pendant les deux mois de vacances (ESLO-2_MX953FEM)
Results: categorical contexts
IF
Corpus
1968
2008
Phrases
avoir besoin
avoir du mal
avoir envie de
avoir lieu
avoir X ans
il y a
none
avoir besoin
avoir du mal
avoir envie de
avoir lieu
avoir X ans
il y a
none
Total
n
11
4
0
0
1
64
42
5
0
1
0
0
41
24
193
%
100.0%
100.0%
0.0%
6.7%
90.1%
84.0%
100.0%
100.0%
0.0%
0.0%
70.7%
70.6%
73.4%
PF
n
0
0
0
1
14
7
8
0
0
0
3
10
17
10
70
%
0.0%
0.0%
100.0%
93.3%
9.9%
16.0%
0.0%
0.0%
100.0%
100.0%
29.3%
29.4%
26.6%
Total
n
11
4
0
1
15
71
50
5
0
1
3
10
58
34
263
Results: overall distribution
100.0%
90.0%
80.0%
75.6%
n=136
70.0%
60.0%
50.0%
40.0%
30.0%
24.4%
n=44
20.0%
10.0%
0.0%
Poplack &
Wagner &
King &
Roberts 2012 ESLO corpus
Turpin 1999 Sankoff 2011 Nadasdi 2003
(avoir)
(1984)
IF
PF
Results: diachronic change
100.0%
90.0%
84.2%
n=85
80.0%
64.6%
n=51
70.0%
60.0%
50.0%
35.4%
n=28
40.0%
30.0%
IF
PF
15.8%
n=16
20.0%
10.0%
0.0%
1968
2008
χ² = 8.726; df=1; p=0.003
Results: factors
 Proximity
IF
Proximity
Less than week
Longer than week
Continual
Total
n
5
117
14
136
%
38.5%
78.0%
82.4%
75.6%
PF
n
8
33
3
44
%
61.5%
22.0%
17.6%
24.4%
Total
n
13
150
17
180
χ² = 10.596; df = 2; p=0.005 (NB low tokens in some cells)
Rbrul (preliminary) results
Application value: Inflected Future
Corpus
1968
2008
Range
Proximity
less than week
continual
longer than week
Range
Log odds
Factor weight
%
n
0.519
-0.519
0.63
0.37
25
84%
64%
101
78
-1.095
0.536
0.559
0.25
0.63
0.64
39
39%
82%
78%
13
17
149
Rbrul: Johnson 2009
Interim conclusions
 What is the distribution of IF and PF in the French of
France? IF > PF (but just how exceptional is AVOIR?)
 Is there any evidence for diachronic change, and in
which direction? YES – decrease in IF
 How does this compare to findings for other
varieties? Similar trends
 What is the influence of linguistic and social factors
identified in previous literature on this variation?
Few significant; proximity, adverbial specification?
Thank you!
Selected references
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Bayley, R. 2004. ‘The quantitative paradigm’, in The Handbook of Language Variation and Change,
ed. by J.K. Chambers, P. Trudgill & N. Schilling-Estes, Oxford: Blackwell, pp.117-141.
Blondeau, H., 2006. La trajectoire de l’emploi du futur chez une cohorte de Montréalais francophones
entre 1971 et 1995. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics / Revue canadienne de linguistique
appliquée, 9(2), pp.73–98. Available at:
http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/CJAL/article/view/19762.
Johnson, D.E. 2009. Getting off the GoldVarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable
rule analysis, Language and Linguistics Compass 3(1): 359-383
King, R. & Nadasdi, T., 2003. Back to the Future in Acadian French. French Language Studies,
13(2003), pp.323–337.
Poplack, S. & Dion, N., 2009. Prescription vs. praxis: The evolution of future temporal reference in
French. Language, 85(3), pp.557–587.
Poplack, S. & St-Amand, A., 2007. A real-time window on 19th-century vernacular French: The Récits
du français québécois d’autrefois. Language in Society, 36(05), pp.707–734. Available at:
http://www.journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0047404507070662 [Accessed September 9, 2014].
Poplack, S. & Turpin, D., 1999. Does the Futur Have a Future in (Canadian) French? Probus:
International Journal of Latin and Romance Linguistics, 11(1), pp.133–64.
Roberts, N.S., 2012. Future Temporal Reference in Hexagonal French. University of Pennsylvania
Working Papers in Linguistics, 18(2), pp.97–106.
Wagner, S.E. & Sankoff, G., 2011. Age grading in the Montréal French inflected future. Language
Variation and Change, 23(03), pp.275–313. Available at:
http://www.journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0954394511000111 [Accessed October 6, 2014].
Examples of exclusions
 Habitual:
 on va aller tous les samedis au supermarché †
 We go to the supermarket every Saturday
 Spatial:
 Un jour j’irai suivre un cours d’anglais *
 One day I’ll go and take an English course
 Gnomic:
 Disons une personne de la Gaspésie qui parle joual va comprendre
quelqu’un de l’Abitibi mais pas tout le vocabulaire *
 Let’s say a person from Gaspésie who speaks joual will understand
someone from Abitibi who speaks joual, but not absolutely all of the
vocabulary
 Hypothetical:
 S’il y a pas de religion personne va se respecter. Tu vas vouloir aller
coucher avec la femme d’en face *
 If there’s no religion, no-one will/would respect each other. You’ll/You’d
want to go sleep with the woman across the street
† Invented examples
* Examples and translations from Wagner and Sankoff 2011