Abstract
Aspectual viewpoint is expressed through tense in French.1 The inseparability of viewpoint and tense creates a close connection, formally and conceptually, between the domains of aspect and temporal location. The language has a perfective, an imperfective, and a neutral viewpoint. They are not available consistently as choices: there is a choice of perfective and imperfective viewpoint in the past tenses, while the other tenses offer no choice and convey either the neutral or the perfective viewpoint. Neither the perfective nor the imperfective is dominant formally in the system, because both viewpoints appear with all situation types. The perfective viewpoint thus departs from the Universal Grammar formulation in being available to states, which it presents as closed.
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Notes
There is an extensive traditional and modern literature on the aspectual system of French, including Grévisse 1949, Garey 1957, Imbs 1960, Klum 1961, Sten 1962, Vet 1980, Benveniste 1966, Guenthner et al 1978, Hoepelman Rohrer 1980, Kamp Rohrer 1989. I would like to thank Jeanne Whitaker for many interesting discussions on this and related topics over a period of years, and for careful reading of this Chapter.
I ignore here the perfect tenses Plus-que-parfait, the Passé Surcomposé, and the Futur Anterieur; and the conditional tenses, Conditionnel I and Conditionnel II.
Not all speakers may agree that en train de can appear with Achievements. Native speakers have informed me that sentences such as 19d are impeccable; but Guenthner Rohrer 1980 found otherwise.
Kamp Rohrer, in discussing similar examples, propose that the Présent has a perfective aspectual value in such cases. In their system, the feature [-Prog] must be associated with the the Présent in reportive speech, whereas the feature [Prog] is associated with it otherwise ( 1989: Chapter 2, 5 ).
Compare the following examples, which have an Imparfait and a Passé Composé in the main clause of a conjunction with quand: (i) Anne chantait quand Paul est arrivé (ii) Anne a chanté quand Paul est arrivé In (i), the only interpretation is that Anne was already singing at the time of Paul’s arrival.
Sentences in the Présent can focus the preliminary stages of Achievements, and therefore represent marked instances of the neutral viewpoint. (i) for instance refers to preliminary stages rather than an actual win, as the translation indicates. (i) Le cheval gagne la course The horse is winning the race The general constraint on Present sentence interpretation blocks the closed interpretation of (i). There is no direct Présent counterpart to 30; while the first conjunct would be in the Présent, the second conjunct would be in the Futur: (ii) Le cheval gagne la course, mais il ne la gagners pas Since the Futur conforms to the unmarked Universal Grammar neutral viewpoint, the simplest, unmarked analysis of the French neutral viewpoint can be maintained in view of the general constraint on Present sentences. I will assume that sentences like (i) are accounted for by that general constraint.
Represented speech, or le style indirect libre, appears in many languages. It has been discussed most extensively for French, in particular by Lips 1926, Hamburger 1973.
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Smith, C.S. (1991). The Aspectual System of French. In: The Parameter of Aspect. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 43. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7911-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7911-7_9
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