Deriving the readings of French être en train de
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Bridget Copley
Abstract
French être en train de (êetd, lit. ‘be.inf in the midst of’), generally considered to be the French progressive, has a reading in which the speaker expresses a negative attitude toward the described event. However, not all readings have this expressive meaning. Curiously, the “neutral” reading is not always felicitous. We consider and reject possible analyses in which the expressive meaning arises due to Gricean inference or due to there being two lexical entries for êetd. We propose that, like ordinary progressives (Portner, 1998), êetd has a modal at-issue meaning with a circumstantial modal base and a stereotypical ordering source. In addition, we argue, it has a modal conventional implicature with either a stereotypical or a bouletic ordering source. In this way we account for the behavior of êetd, and raise certain questions as to how conventional implicatures might be related to grammaticalization of aspect.
Abstract
French être en train de (êetd, lit. ‘be.inf in the midst of’), generally considered to be the French progressive, has a reading in which the speaker expresses a negative attitude toward the described event. However, not all readings have this expressive meaning. Curiously, the “neutral” reading is not always felicitous. We consider and reject possible analyses in which the expressive meaning arises due to Gricean inference or due to there being two lexical entries for êetd. We propose that, like ordinary progressives (Portner, 1998), êetd has a modal at-issue meaning with a circumstantial modal base and a stereotypical ordering source. In addition, we argue, it has a modal conventional implicature with either a stereotypical or a bouletic ordering source. In this way we account for the behavior of êetd, and raise certain questions as to how conventional implicatures might be related to grammaticalization of aspect.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
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Word order and related pragmatic or semantic effects
- Focus fronting and its implicatures 1
- Romance causatives and object shift 21
- Conditionally interpreted declaratives in Spanish 39
- Microparametric variation in Old ItaloRomance syntax 51
- Different effects of syntactic knowledge, associative memory and working memory in L2 processing of filler-gap dependencies 67
-
Morphology and semantics of the verb and verb placement
- The paradigmatic instantiation of TAM 85
- Deriving the readings of French être en train de 103
- On the syntax of datives in unaccusative configurations 119
- The perfect between Latin and Romance 159
- Productivity and Portuguese morphology 175
- Reflexively marked anticausatives are not semantically reflexive 203
-
Morphosyntax of the DP and its relation to clause structure
- Deverbal nominalization with the ‘Down’-operator 223
- The (non-)grammaticalization of possession in Guatemalan Spanish 239
- On Spanish possessive formation 261
- Language Index 277
- Subject Index 279
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
-
Word order and related pragmatic or semantic effects
- Focus fronting and its implicatures 1
- Romance causatives and object shift 21
- Conditionally interpreted declaratives in Spanish 39
- Microparametric variation in Old ItaloRomance syntax 51
- Different effects of syntactic knowledge, associative memory and working memory in L2 processing of filler-gap dependencies 67
-
Morphology and semantics of the verb and verb placement
- The paradigmatic instantiation of TAM 85
- Deriving the readings of French être en train de 103
- On the syntax of datives in unaccusative configurations 119
- The perfect between Latin and Romance 159
- Productivity and Portuguese morphology 175
- Reflexively marked anticausatives are not semantically reflexive 203
-
Morphosyntax of the DP and its relation to clause structure
- Deverbal nominalization with the ‘Down’-operator 223
- The (non-)grammaticalization of possession in Guatemalan Spanish 239
- On Spanish possessive formation 261
- Language Index 277
- Subject Index 279
