Les catégories aspectuelles à expression périphrastique : une interprétation des apprarentes « lacunes » du français - article ; n°1 ; vol.141, pg 85-98

Langue française - Année 2004 - Volume 141 - Numéro 1 - Pages 85-98The comparative description of aspectual periphrases in French, Italian and the Ibero-Romance languages shows that Modern French shares largely with the other Romance languages a system of aspectual periphrases distributed over at least two levels of structure. The main differences stem from the ruin of the present participle/gerundial periphrases after the Middle French period. They are less acute in view of the fact that some of the corresponding periphrases in the other languages show symptoms of retreat, and of the fact that French has recreated an expression for the Progressive which is similar in ist semantics to the Italian progressive. However, the frequence of occurrence of être en train de seems to be dramatically lower than that of ist counterparts. Furthermore, temporal localisation dominates over aspect in the case of aller + INF. This lends plausibility to the idea that syntactic/viewpoint aspect is more unstable and less exploited in French than in the other Romance languages.14 pagesSource : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.