TY - CHAP
T1 - The Use of the Future and Conditional in High Medieval Literature
AU - Dreer, Igor
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013.
PY - 2013/1/1
Y1 - 2013/1/1
N2 - In Old French, the leveling of the conjugation paradigms of the Romance Future and Present due to diachronic sound changes resulted in the loss of the synthetic Latin future, which was replaced by periphrases, formed from the infinitive and the present indicative of the verb habere‘to have’: e.g. chanter-ai‘I will sing’. Moreover, a new periphrastic form, the conditional or the form in –roie, was created by the combination of the infinitive and the imperfect indicative of habere‘to have’: e.g. chanter-eie > chanter-oie‘I would sing’. This chapter presents a synchronic sign-oriented analysis of the distribution of the Old French Future and Conditional in medieval texts. The analysis shows that the distribution of both forms was not random, but rather motivated by their invariant meanings. The proposed hypothesis is that the Old French Future meant specific future occurrences, whereas the Old French Conditional meant some question about the realization of future occurrences. Therefore, future occurrenceis postulated as referring to the former and future occurrence questionedas referring to the latter. The analysis shows that both forms consistently appeared not only in individual sentences, but also within entire texts.
AB - In Old French, the leveling of the conjugation paradigms of the Romance Future and Present due to diachronic sound changes resulted in the loss of the synthetic Latin future, which was replaced by periphrases, formed from the infinitive and the present indicative of the verb habere‘to have’: e.g. chanter-ai‘I will sing’. Moreover, a new periphrastic form, the conditional or the form in –roie, was created by the combination of the infinitive and the imperfect indicative of habere‘to have’: e.g. chanter-eie > chanter-oie‘I would sing’. This chapter presents a synchronic sign-oriented analysis of the distribution of the Old French Future and Conditional in medieval texts. The analysis shows that the distribution of both forms was not random, but rather motivated by their invariant meanings. The proposed hypothesis is that the Old French Future meant specific future occurrences, whereas the Old French Conditional meant some question about the realization of future occurrences. Therefore, future occurrenceis postulated as referring to the former and future occurrence questionedas referring to the latter. The analysis shows that both forms consistently appeared not only in individual sentences, but also within entire texts.
KW - Future Occurrence
KW - Linguistic Context
KW - Linguistic Form
KW - Linguistic Sign
KW - Twelfth Century
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84930439947&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-94-007-4768-5_12
DO - 10.1007/978-94-007-4768-5_12
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:84930439947
T3 - Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
SP - 221
EP - 242
BT - Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
PB - Springer Science and Business Media B.V.
ER -