Affiliation:
1. 395673 Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia, Mahidol University , Salaya , Nakhon Pathom , Thailand
Abstract
Abstract
Scholars have yet to establish a consensus regarding French equivalents of the English present perfect (PP). This study investigates the French equivalents of the PP through the lens of parallel corpora. Although the passé composé is commonly considered the French equivalent, no singular tense in French entirely mirrors the PP. This paper challenges this assumption by suggesting other French forms as viable correspondences, including the présent de l’indicatif, the passé récent, the futur antérieur, and the imparfait. Leveraging the benefits of parallel corpora for crosslinguistic analysis, these forms were scrutinized in relation to their function and application across different uses of the PP. The findings provide empirical evidence that enriches the understanding of the crosslinguistic complexity between the PP and its French equivalents, offering valuable insights for foreign language learning, teaching, and translation. The study also stresses the importance of interpretations of tense equivalences in the pursuit of successful crosslinguistic communication.
Reference50 articles.
1. Apothéloz, Denis. 2016. Sémantique du passé composé en français moderne et exploration des rapports passé composé/passé simple dans un corpus de moyen français. In Pierre-Don Giancarli & Marc Fryd (eds.), Aoristes et parfaits en français, latin, corse, estonien et polonais, 199–246. Leiden: Brill Rodopi.
2. Barlow, Michael. 2008. Parallel texts and corpus-based contrastive analysis. In María de los Ángeles Gómez González, John Lachlan Mackenzie & Elsa Maria González Álvarez (eds.), Current trends in contrastive linguistics: Functional and cognitive perspectives, 101–121. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
3. Batchelor, Ronald E. & Malliga Chebli-Saadi. 2011. A reference grammar of French. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4. Booth, Trudie M. 2010. A complete French grammar for reference and practice. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
5. Bres, Jacques. 2010. Polysémie ou monosémie du passé composé? Actualisation, interaction, effets de sens produits. In Dejan Stosic, Nelly Flaux & Co Vet (eds.), Interpréter les temps verbaux, 161–180. Bern: Peter Lang.