Temps, aspect et modalité en français (review)

Estelle Moline and Carl Vetters’s edited volume, originating from a workshop at the Association for French Language Studies’ annual conference at Boulogne-sur-Mer in 2007, collates fifteen research papers, the majority of which are dedicated to the semantics of the French tense system. The studies approach tense, aspect, and modality (TAM) from a very wide base, examining French tenses (e.g. the passé composé), lexical periphrases (e.g. être en train de), adverbials, and prepositions, and offering some very detailed descriptive presentations of the meanings conveyed by particular tenses. In this respect, many authors adopt a concept-oriented approach, in that they investigate, for instance, a concept such as ‘perfectivity’ and how it is marked in French. This is no more clearly illustrated than in Denis Apothéloz and Małgorzata Nowakowska’s exploration, focusing on the passé composé, of resultative and perfect meanings in French as compared with Polish. These authors also argue for a distinction to be made between pragmatic and semantic resultativity, the difference between the two being dependent on how resultative meaning is built up in sentences — through the semantics of tense and/or derived from discourse pragmatics. Indeed, Louis de Saussure, in his chapter, looks at this very question with regard to the use of puis, a so-called ‘temporal connector’; he compares puis and et puis and the contexts in which they vary. Lexical periphrases are also investigated in this volume, including aller + infinitive and venir de + infinitive. Lidia Lebas-Fraczak undertakes an interesting review of être en train de, in which different tenses (e.g. the imparfait) are compared with this lexical periphrasis in terms of their aspectual semantics. Overall, the collection presents a useful overview of TAM in French, and it also incorporates, if only to a limited extent, some cross-linguistic analyses, notably the study by Apothéloz and Nowakowska. There is clearly more room for future cross-linguistic comparisons, especially between languages that differ in how they mark time reference and aspect. Such comparisons, especially for arguably universal meanings (such as time reference), will be particularly beneficial for linguistic theory and its application (such as in language teaching and acquisition).