Contenu du sommaire : Du conditionnel

This paper deals with the so-called “subjective temporal” use of the conditional tense (Il savait que je viendrais / He knew that I would come). First we will expose the difficulties to which is confronted the analysis of this use by means of the concept of “prospective possibility” (see Gosselin 1999, and in the framework of branching time semantics, Martin 1981, Vuillaume 2001 and Bres 2009). We then propose, in this framework, a new analysis of prospective possibility, which responds to the indicated difficulties and provides new predictions on the semantics of statements using “subjective temporal” conditional tense.

This article analyzes the temporal use of the (present) conditional in the negative factive constructions {ne pas savoir / ne pas se douter / ignorer que} + conditional (e.g. Ma fille ne se doutait pas que je passerais par là ‘My daughter did not suspect I would go through there'), that seems to invalidate the hypothesis according to which ulteriority is calculated from a reported enunciation. The corpus study highlights that the conditional, found in positive factive structures from Old French onwards, only appears in negative factive structures in the 17th century. We hypothesize that, on the grammaticalization path of the initial subjective use into an objective use (19th century), that construction constitutes a switch context, in which the subjective source value disappears in favour of the objective target value.

This paper will put forth an innovative research program on the French conditionnel, backing it with some relatively detailed empirical arguments. The research hypothesis here advanced can be described as constructionalist in the broadest sense (and not simply in the sense of Goldberg 1995). The main idea defended here is that the diversity of the so-called ‘uses' (emplois) of the conditional cannot be accounted for by means of a single semantic invariant (monosemy), nor purely through productive polysemous or homonymous relations between various readings. Rather, it sometimes implies conventionnalized forms/meanings pairings at the level of syntactically complex constructions.

In this article, we show that the use of the conditional that we call “conditionnel épistémique 1” (CE1) can be considered, in its own right, by its conventional meaning, as an reportive evidential marker. We also show that the meaning element of non-commitment (neutral position), which is often associated with this tense as neutral stance of the speaker, sometimes even as the most important feature of its proper meaning, “en langue”, is only a secondary meaning element, which derives indirectly from its reportive meaning and can be perfectly overruled by elements of the context.

This study deals with the use of the French conditional exemplified in L'ennemi aurait pris la fuite, called CE1. This usage has been extensively studied for Modern French, but only scarcely for earlier stages. This article analyses the semantics of the CE1 in Classical French (16th-18th centuries) in the specific genre of notarial acts. The article presents the earliest occurrence ever found (1507) and advances the hypothesis that the inherent original semantics of the CE1 includes an evidential element and/or an element of non-confirmation.

The purpose of this study is to examine from a diachronic point of view the competition of past conditional and past perfect subjunctive in the hypothetical system expriming unreal past condition, the conditional taking gradually the place of the subjunctive in mixed systems. By taking into account preclassic and classic French period, we shall try to verify the hypothesis that the respective order of the subordinate and the main clause is one of factors of evolution, the order protase+apodose favoring the use of conditional, which appears as being an integral part of prototypical hypothetical construction, while unreal condition expressed by subjunctive is less dependent on syntactic context.

We aim to test the semantic difference between French epistemic devoir and Italian epistemic dovere in the conditional mood (the former seeming to convey a stronger indication of necessity than the latter). By means of quantitative analysis, we take into account the textual environments of the modal verb devoir/dovere as well as its degree of representativeness in corpora which indicate genre and diachronic variation in the two languages considered.

This paper addresses the compositionality of the French modal verb devoir (‘must') in past conditional sentences, focusing on the intriguing fact that such sentences tend to trigger counterfactual interpretations. This is puzzling in particular because neither the verb nor the tense would achieve this interpretation alone. We suggest that this is due to a conflict between evidential, modal and temporal features, from which a meaning of wrong past expectations, hence counterfactuality, emerges pragmatically.

In this paper, we tackle a specific (and overlooked) deontic usage of the conditional mood, found in argumentative contexts. We first highlight the semantic core of the conditional mood, which consists in expressing the irrealis nature of the state of affairs denoted, and then discuss three examples in which a non-desirability judgement supersedes this feature, therefore making it irrelevant. We thus show how the interpretative potential of the conditional mood allows deontic readings to emerge as a resource with which the speaker can convey her opinion that certain actual states of affairs should no longer be the case.