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Perspectival usages of French past time verbal tenses: an experimental investigation.
- Source :
- Journal of French Language Studies; Nov2021, Vol. 31 Issue 3, p294-317, 24p
- Publication Year :
- 2021
-
Abstract
- In this paper, we carried out two experimental studies to investigate whether verbal tenses, in their perspectival usages, give access to the speaker's perspective. Study 1 is an annotation study in which annotators evaluated corpus excerpts as expressing situations or narrating events in a subjective or objective way. We manipulated access to the verbal tense: half of the annotators saw the tense of the verbs, and half saw only infinitive forms of the verbs. Study 2 is a self-paced reading experiment in which we examined how native speakers of French process utterances with the Passé Simple when it is preceded by aujourd'hui (semantic incompatibility solved pragmatically by perspective-taking), hier (semantic and pragmatic compatibility) and en ce moment (semantic incompatibility which cannot be solved pragmatically). The results of Study 1 suggest that the subjective interpretation of an utterance is not triggered by its verbal tense. Study 2 questions the idea that perspective-taking is a component of speaker's subjectivity. In general, our experimental findings do not support the hypothesis that verbal tenses give access to speaker's subjectivity, a theoretical hypothesis which has never before been directly experimentally tested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- TENSE (Grammar)
NATIVE language
VERBS
SUBJECTIVITY
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 09592695
- Volume :
- 31
- Issue :
- 3
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Journal of French Language Studies
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 154813740
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959269520000307