The future of Martinique French: The role of random effects on the variable expression of futurity

Abstract

AbstractThis article adds a Caribbean perspective to the analysis of futurity by presenting a quantitative variationist investigation of the competing forms used by speakers to encode future time in the Frenchdépartement et région d'outre-merof Martinique. The two variants under investigation are the inflected future (je partirai‘I will leave’) and the periphrastic future (je vais partir‘I am going to leave’). In this variety, the periphrastic future is identified as the most frequent variant. Fixed-effects and mixed-effects models furthermore tease apart the complex set of constraints governing variant selection and demonstrate the repercussions of considering speaker and lexical effects when analysing sociolinguistic data. Indeed, once individual speaker and word-level variation are controlled for, the future variable in Martinique French is constrained purely by temporal distance: while the periphrastic future acts as the default option in the majority of time contexts, the inflected future functions asthemarker of distal time.