Texting the future in Belgium and Québec: Present matters

Abstract

This study investigates the variation in the expression of Future Temporal Reference in text messages in Belgian and Québécois French. Three variants are considered: the Futurate Present, the Synthetic Future and the Analytic Future. The results of multivariate analyses show that the use of the Futurate Present does not appear to be subject to dialectal variation: both communities use this variant at similar rates, and the use of the variant is constrained by the same linguistic factors. The two dialects show differences in their choice of the Synthetic vs the Analytic Future. Unlike Québécois French, Belgian French strongly favours the Synthetic Future. The two dialects also differ with respect to the linguistic constraints in effect. Our analysis shows the need to explore the relationship between variants, and to distinguish between Covert T (realized as Present tense) and Overt T (either Synthetic or Analytic Future). Our results point toward the hybrid nature of text messages: while our results show patterns of use in line with oral/conversational corpora as reflected by the dialectal variation observed, text messages are not exempt from the influence of written French, as shown by the use of Synthetic Future forms in affirmative sentences in the Québec corpus.

Variation and change in future temporal reference with avoir and être

“…Two recent studies offer further evidence to support this hypothesis: Côté (2018) and Tremblay et al (2019). Côté (2018) looks at FTR in L2 French.…”

“…The authors attribute this to learners' earlier exposure to, and thus greater familiarity with, these two verbs, as well as to their high frequency overall. In their study of FTR in text messages, Tremblay et al (2019) also found that verb type was a significant factor, with avoir, être and modal verbs being much more likely to appear with IF. 23 They argue that this is related to morphological complexity: the more irregular the paradigm, the more likely the use of IF.…”

“…First, it is marginal in quantitative terms (other studies have found it accounts for less than 10% of tokens referring to future time; e.g. Poplack and Turpin 1999 -7%; Poplack and Dion 2009 -9%; though see Tremblay et al 2019 for a discussion of FP in text messages). Second, it seems to be relatively stable over time.…”

“…Two studies which are also relevant here are Côté (2018) and Tremblay, Blondeau and Labeau (2019). Both of these studies consider the role of verb type; specifically, irregular vs. regular verbs, in FTR usage in L2 French and text messages (SMS) respectively.…”

“…Tremblay et al (2019) include the [futurate] present in their analysis, and indeed this is found to be the most common form used to refer to future time in their corpus (seeTremblay et al 2019 for in-depth discussion of the significance of this novel finding).Journal of French Language Studies…”