Future reference and current relevance with the french composed past (2nd uncorrected proofs)

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Future reference and currentrelevance with the Frenchcomposed past

LOU I S DE S AU S SU R E

. INTRODUCTION

,e French composed past (CP, passé composé) is usually treated in the literature as apast tense which o-en, but not always, conveys a perfect1 meaning. What is less o-enpointed out is that it is also commonly used to refer to future times.

Morphologically, the CP is composed of an auxiliary in the present and a past par-ticiple. Since Benveniste’s work on verbal composition in French (Benveniste 1966,1974), it is generally admitted that the CP has two main types of meaning dependingon the context: anterior CP and perfect CP.2 ,e anterior CP ful.ls a narrative func-tion, which corresponds to a large extent to that of the simple past (passé simple), itselfnowadays almost only found in written narration. ,e perfect CP is comparable to theEnglish present perfect inasmuch as it primarily serves to communicate that a state ofa/airs resulting from the expressed eventuality holds and is relevant at speech time.3,e research question addressed in this chapter concerns future reference with the CP

1 Perfect tenses or interpretations are about states resulting from an eventuality, as in ‘John has arrived’,which conveys that John is here. ,e notion must not be confused with perfective tenses or interpreta-tions, which are about the boundedness of the eventuality itself, as in ‘John arrived’, which encodes therepresentation of a mere event in the past. Perfective readings contrast with imperfective ones; the notion ofimperfectivity is not grammaticalized in English (whereas dynamicity is), and this is the source of numerousconfusions in the literature.

2 Passé composé de l’antériorité and passé composé de l’accompli.3 Damourette and Pichon (–) documented this resultative/perfect meaning in depth.

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Future reference with the French composed past

in independent clauses, as in (1), and more precisely the meaning conveyed by suchforms in comparison with other ways of expressing (‘resultative’) futurity.

(1) J’aiI have-AUX

bientôtsoon

!ni..nished

I soon .nish-CP‘I will be done soon.’

We defend a pragmatic hypothesis accounting for the restrictions on the use of the CPwith future reference, or, as we shall call it henceforth, the futurate CP. We start froman assumption by Sthioul (1998) according to which the futurate CP imposes an allo-centric projection into the future, that is, a perspectival shi- of S4 to a future referencepoint from which the eventuality is considered past. ,is chpater intends to show thatSthioul’s assumption is correct but incomplete, since it cannot by itself predict whichcontexts (linguistic and pragmatic) license futurate CPs. ,ere are in fact a numberof conditions that have to be satis.ed for the futurate CP to occur, which help under-stand the nature of the pragmatic e/ects triggered by this particular way of expressingthe future. In particular, we suggest that the futurate CP ultimately implies relevanceat speech time (the actual S-point). Besides, we argue, the futurate CP activates prag-matic aspects of communication which concern speci.c psychological and/or per-locutionary e/ects related to what should be done in the present time in view of thefuture situation predicted to happen. We elaborate this point towards the end of thechapter.

We also suggest that the future situation referred to by futurate CPs is not the even-tuality itself but the state of a/airs resulting from it. ,is allows us to classify the futu-rate CP as a perfect rather than an anterior use of the CP.

We begin by reviewing the main types of meanings that the CP can convey and bydiscussing the futurate CP in relation to these, with a closer look at the linguistic con-texts licensing it. ,en we turn to Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) notion of interpretiveuse and discuss the hypothesis that the futurate CP activates a type of metarepresen-tation, that is, does not directly represent a situation but a thought about a situation(here a viewpoint triggered by a perspectival shi- of the S-point). In the concludingdiscussion, we will consider the possibility that the futurate CP may involve simula-tion rather than metarepresentation in the realm of theory of mind. We develop theidea that the futurate CP is possible only if it licenses a pragmatic inference about adeontic-practical modality in the present, that is, an inference about what should bedone in the very present.

4 S stands for speech point (Reichenbach ) and represents the moment of speech.

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. THE FRENCH COMPOSED PAST: BACKGROUND

,e literature identi.es two main meanings of the CP: a narrative-anterior meaning,illustrated in (2), and a perfect meaning with a resulting state true at S, illustrated in (3):

(2) Le concierge est sorti, il a fermé la porte et a quitté les lieux (a-er Sthioul 1998),e caretaker come out-CP, lock-CP the door and leave-CP the premises.‘,e caretaker came out, locked the door and le- the premises.’

(3) Le président est sorti.,e President go out-CP‘,e President has gone out.’

Sentence (2) represents a sequence of eventualities that happened in the past, whereas(3) behaves more like an English present perfect: not only did the president go out atsome time in the past, but the consequences of this eventuality still hold in the presentand are the focus of the communication (the President is currently out). Sentence (3)is natural with a temporal present indexical, which shows that the focus of the perfectcan indeed be the present time S:

(3') En ce moment, le président est sorti.At the moment/currently, the President go out-CP

Sthioul (1998) provides (4), to which we add (5) (in a passive form) and (6), whilenoting that sometimes a change in the complement makes the example more natural,as with (4'):

(4) En ce moment il a plu, mais dans une heure vous pourrez jouer au tennis. (Sthioul1998)At the moment, it rain-CP, but in an hour, you will be able to play tennis.

(4') Là il a plu, mais dans une heure vous pourrez jouer au tennis.±Now it rain-CP, but in an hour, you will be able to play tennis.

(5) En ce moment, il a été averti de l’imminence de son expulsion (. . . ) (Geneva statecouncil minutes, 10 January 2006)At the moment, he be-CP warned of the imminence of his expulsion.

(6) En ce moment il a signé un contrat avec Aris Salonique, un club grec (web news-paper Quotidien Le Jour)5

At the moment, he sign-CP a contract with Aris ,essaloniki, a Greek club.

Luscher and Sthioul (1996) note that a present indexical is not available in all cases:

5 <http://www.quotidienlejour.com.>

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(7) Victor Hugo a écrit Les MisérablesVictor Hugo write-CP Les Misérables

(7') ? En ce moment/Maintenant, Victor Hugo a écrit Les Misérables (Luscher andSthioul 1996)At the moment/Now, Victor Hugo write-CP Les Misérables.

,ey suggest that (7) is a distinct use (which they call ‘autonomous type’). I proposeinstead that this is of the same type as other perfect utterances with the CP, howeverwith the restriction that the complement is not pragmatically licensed: the resultingstate is unbounded on the right, just as situations described by unbounded presentsare (for example "e earth is round); thus it is di;cult to see/make out the relevanceof such eventualities when asserted true precisely at speech time, except in the case ofa metalinguistic reading (see de Saussure 2003 for a development of this argument).(7') is therefore (pragmatically) as odd as ?"e earth is round now or ?Victor Hugois currently the author of Les Misérables, since the truth conditions are satis.ed inthe present without any deictic marking. ,is holds unless the speaker expresses anopinion as such, which might change one day, in which case a metalinguistic readingoccurs. ,is a/ects neither the perfect nature of the CP in (7), nor, consequently, theemergence of a resulting state relevant in the present time of speech.6

,e CP can also express a remote past experience (McCawley 1971; Apothéloz2009), either singular (8) or repeated (9), an interpretation which is lost in the presenceof a present indexical ((8') and (9') cannot trigger the ‘remote experience’ reading):

(8) J’ai mangé de la girafeI eat-CP gira/e‘I have (already) eaten gira/e (meat).’

(8') Aujourd’hui j’ai mangé de la girafeToday I eat-CP gira/e‘I have eaten gira/e today.’

(9) J’ai aimé aller au cinémaI like-CP go to the pictures‘I used to enjoy going to the pictures.’

(9') Aujourd’hui j’ai aimé aller au cinémaToday I like-CP go to the pictures‘I (have) enjoyed going to the pictures today.’

6 See de Saussure (). Klein () discusses a similar kind of constraint for English, which he callsthe position-de!niteness constraint.

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Wilson and Sperber (1993c) consider (8), or its English counterpart with the presentperfect (Wilson and Sperber 1993b), as a type of utterance which doesn’t trigger a ‘cur-rent relevance’ reading, as opposed to utterances like (3). ,ey contrast (8) with I haveeaten uttered in response to an invitation for lunch. Examples such as (8) nonethelessclearly express a present consequence in the form of the relevance of the state of a/airsinduced by the past experience, something like ‘the experience of eating exotic veni-son is part of the speaker’s life and this fact is relevant in the present context of speech’.Here too, it is obviously the unboundedness of such an ‘experiential’ state of a/airsthat blocks the insertion of a present indexical expression, rather than current rele-vance, even though examples such as (8) (but less easily (9)) are themselves ambigu-ous: they can also lead to a narrative reading where what is in focus is an event thathappened in a narrative context.7 ,us in (8') and (9'), a present indexical cannot beinserted without blocking the ‘experiential’ reading, for similar reasons as in (5). ,eabove considerations suggest that there is no crucial di/erence between cases like (3),which are typical of the perfect CP, cases like (7), and cases like (8) or (9), except forthe unboundedness of the resulting state, and except that (8) can have both anteriorand perfect readings. When not read as anterior, they are all, one way or another, per-fects pointing at consequences in the present, in the sense of a relevant state of a/airsholding at S.

So far, the only type of reading of CP-sentences which can’t communicate directrelevance in the present is the anterior, narrative, one.8 Another one may however besimilar in this respect: the futurate CP.

. FUTURATE CP AS AN ALLOCENTRIC CP

.. deixis shift with the futurate cp

Under certain pragmatic conditions—to which we turn later in the chapter—aCP-sentence can be modi.ed by a future-time adverb, giving rise to what we call thefuturate CP. Such combinations are very common in hypotheticals (si tu as rangé tachambre à midi, nous irons au cinéma, ‘if you tidy up-CP your room by noon, we’ll

7 Other forms are available in varieties of French for expressing past experience. Apothéloz () sug-gests that the Francoprovençal version prefers the double composed past tense for experiential meanings(as J’ai eu mangé de la girafe, unavailable in standard French; on the double composed past in French, seede Saussure and Sthioul and ).

8 We disregard here what Gosselin () calls ‘historical CP’, which he also takes to imply a shi-edperspectival reference, such as Ce jour-là, Luc arrive chez Paul. Comme il a !ni de manger, il lui demandes’il veut bien l’accompagner (‘,at day, Luc arrives at Paul’s place. As he .nish-CP eating, he asks him if heagrees to accompany him’).

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go to the pictures’), which we will leave aside here. ,ey are also very common inindependent clauses, usually with aspectual verbs and without negation:

(1) J’ai bientôt !niI soon .nish-CP

(10) Le président est bientôt sorti de sa reunion,e President exit-CP soon from his meeting

(11) Dans un an, j’ai !ni ma thèse (Sthioul 1998)In a year, I complete-CP my thesis

Negative and negative-interrogative sentences can also occur with futurate-CP read-ings, but they seem available only in very speci.c situations (see Section 11.4):

(12) Tu n’as pas bientôt !ni.You not-soon .nish-CP‘You won’t be done until much later.’

(13) Tu n’as pas bientôt !ni?You not-soon .nish-CP‘Aren’t you done soon?’

,e futurate-CP is available in other Romance languages, quite straightforwardly inItalian,9 subject to diastratic and diatopic variation in Spanish:10

(14) Tra un attimo ho !nito (Italian)(15) Pronto he terminado (accepted in some varieties of Spanish)

,e English present perfect shares many properties with the French CP, whose mor-phological make-up is similar. Yet the English present perfect cannot occur in sen-tences together with a future time adverbial. (16), (17), and (18) are ungrammatical:

(16) !I have soon .nished.(17) !,e president has soon .nished his meeting.(18) !Within a year from now, I have .nished my thesis.

,e above examples are .ne with almost (I have almost !nished; "e President hasalmost !nished his meeting; I have almost !nished my thesis) but the meaning of almostis not that of a future, even though it indicates that the eventuality is not (yet) the caseat the time of utterance. ,e reason for which the English present perfect does notpermit a future reading might simply be that it does not accept temporal adverbs in

9 Laura Baranzini, Pier Marco Bertinetto (p. c.). 10 Juan Sanchez-Mendez, Steve Oswald (p. c.).

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general, which is a well-known phenomenon discussed in depth in the literature sinceKlein (1992) and which came to be known as the perfect puzzle.:

(19) !Paul has arrived at .ve.

,ere are some exceptions, notably with adverbs that do not locate an eventuality pre-cisely in time but provide other information that is currently relevant, such as withPaul has arrived recently or He has done this before. It is striking that the French CP, incontrast, licenses all sorts of temporal adverbials:

(20) Paul est arrivé à cinq heures/hier/avant toi, etc.Paul arrive-CP at .ve/yesterday/before you, etc.

Whatever the right explanation (Klein 1992 proposes a model where the tense andadverbs have di/erent and potentially conJicting referential functions), it remains thatsoon is similar to recently, which marks a relative distance from the speech point, butnot to at !ve, which marks an absolute position, so that one could expect futuratepresent perfect sentences to be grammatical—but they are not. A further explanationmight be that the English present perfect is a true perfect while the French CP hasan ambiguous reference to the past eventuality and to the present resultative state,depending on context, which allows adverbs to scope either over the resulting state, asin examples (4), (5), and (6), or over the eventuality itself, as in (20), without in the lat-ter case depriving the resulting state of its relevance. We will now focus on French only.

Sthioul (1998) suggests that the futurate CP imposes a kind of future deictic shi- or,as he puts it, an ‘allocentric’ perspective. ,is amounts to saying that the eventuality isperceived as past and the resulting state as present, but from an allocentric perspectivesituated at the future time indicated by the adverbial. ,is line of thought implies thatthe original combination of coordinates speci.ed by the tense is not altered but trans-ported into the future, to be anchored to an allocentric viewpoint instead of the actualS-point. A Reichenbachian-like de.nition of the CP in French can then be spelled outas follows, along the lines of suggestions previously formulated elsewhere and di/er-ently (Luscher and Sthioul 1996; Sthioul 1998; de Saussure 2003):

E-R, S & E " E & S # E

which reads: E anterior to R, itself simultaneous with S, and E triggers a resulting stateE holding at speech time.

,e allocentric representation in the future that is relevant for the CP then readslike this:

S-S' & [E-R, S' & E " E & S' # E]

where S' indicates an allocentric projection of S at a time indicated by the future adverb,which functions as a deictic shi-er.

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,is means that the eventuality is represented as being true at a time considered pastfrom the allocentric deictically shi-ed future projection S' of S. If this line of analysisis correct, then the futurate CP does not represent a situation directly, but an (allocen-tric) representation of a situation. In that sense, the futurate CP seems to fall into thecategory of metarepresentational, interpretive, uses of language (Sperber and Wilson1995; de Saussure 2010). ,ere are other elements pointing towards such a metarep-resentational account, notably the metalinguistic Javour of these utterances, to whichwe return below. However, there are also reasons to suggest that these cases involve asimulation rather than a metarepresentation in the full sense; we turn to these issuesrelating to theory of mind in the conclusion.

,e questions raised by the futurate CP have to do with (i) referential status (is it theeventuality, the resulting state or both which are understood as true in the future?), (ii)restrictions on its use, and (iii) its pragmatic e/ects, that is, what motivates choosingit rather than more predictable morphemes such as future tenses, notably the anteriorfuture, which also situates an eventuality (and possibly a resulting state) in the past ofa future point. We now turn to a systematic examination of these issues.

.. referential status and metalinguistic reading

,e referential status of the futurate CP is only scarcely documented. Desclés andGuentchéva (2003) suggest without much elaboration that the eventuality denoted bythe predicate is conceived of as being in progress at S and achieved only in the future.,e futurate CP, according to them, therefore triggers a resulting state which beginsonly in the future (its le- bound is situated in the future). However this assumption isproblematic in several respects.

First, with aspectual verbs like !nir or terminer (roughly: ‘.nish’, ‘achieve’), whichare the most usual verbs in futurate CP sentences, the event of ‘.nish’ can certainlynot be considered as being in the course of happening at speech time: what may becurrently in progress is the action that stands as argument for the aspectual verb (xin !nish x). For example, in (11), strictly speaking, ‘.nish the thesis’ is not currently inprogress; if anything at all, ‘write the thesis’ is (unless ‘doing x’ is considered a part of‘.nishing x’, but this is not happening with (11)). ,e eventuality actually in progresscan even be le- unsaid, leaving the addressee to either infer it or dispose of it on thegrounds of its irrelevance: (1) can well mean ‘I will soon be done’, whatever the action,when it su;ces to infer that the speaker will be shortly ready or available.

Second, when the verb is full, that is not aspectual, Desclés and Guentchéva’sassumption is simply wrong. In (10) for example, it would predict that a dynamicreading of sortir (‘exit’, ‘leave’) occurs, implying that the President is currently in thecourse of leaving the meeting at speech point, which is certainly not part of (10)’s truthconditions.

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Crucially, the futurate CP does not imply that an eventuality is actually going onat speech point. For instance, (11) can be uttered by a person who has not yet startedher research at all, so that not only the resulting state ! but also the eventuality E aresituated in the future.

,ere is more: an interpretation where the eventuality has already happened at S butwhose resultative state is relevant in the future only is clearly available. Sentence (21)can very well be interpreted that way. Suppose the interlocutors discuss the possibilityof going tomorrow at the considered house and someone utters:

(21) Demain, le couvreur a réparé le toit et nous pouvons aller sur place comme prévu(/et nous allons sur place comme prévu).Tomorrow the slater mend-CP the roof and we can go there as planned (/andwe go there as planned).

,e utterance is .ne even without knowing whether ! (the resulting state) is true ornot at S already. In other words, that the eventuality E has happened or not at S is notpart of the truth conditions of the futurate-CP sentence and is thus only the result ofan optional pragmatic inference. At the same time, it is clearly necessary that E willhave indeed already happened at S$, which is positioned by the adverb.

,is makes the futurate CP very similar to the anterior future: in both cases E musthave happened before R (the reference point), itself being situated a-er S, and nothingis conveyed about the temporal relation between E and S. On the strict side of temporalreference, the description is actually the same for both forms, so that an account solelybased on temporal reference fails to capture the clear di/erence of meaning betweenthe two kinds of utterances, however clear that di/erence may be.

,e addition of a switched deictic point S$ with the futurate CP is of course ananswer to the necessity of capturing this di/erence. In so doing, we account for themetalinguistic Javour of CP-utterances but still preserve the original semantics ofthe French CP. ,e combination of temporal coordinates and intervals implied by thetense is simply switched ahead in time to a moment speci.ed by the adverbial.

According to this analysis, the interpretation of futurate CP utterances, for example(21), is not something like Tomorrow we will be able to go there since the slater will havemended the roof already, but an allocentric representation that looks more or less likeLet’s imagine we are tomorrow: we can go to the house, since the roof has been mended.Such an interpretation brings about the representation by an allocentric viewpoint ofan instance (here: we tomorrow) which can assert the CP-utterance in full right butwithout the adverb.

In that sense, the futurate-CP utterances we are considering are just ordinary CP-utterances, except that they are conceived of as utterred, or utterable, at a future pointof time indicated by the adverb. (1), if this is correct, means: I will soon be able to saytruthfully ‘I have !nished’, (10) It will soon be possible to say truthfully ‘"e Presidenthas le# the meeting’, (11) In a year, I will be able to say truthfully ‘I have !nished my

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thesis’, and so on. ,us the scope of the adverb is not over the temporal reference ofthe eventuality or of the resulting state, but over the utterability of the sentence. Hence,we conclude, the adverb plays a metalinguistic role by positioning S'. All this is com-pletely absent from the anterior future, and, expectedly, has a number of pragmaticconsequences.

,is analysis may seem too complex an apparatus to account for very commonutterances like (1), but some common types of utterances do certainly activate com-plex representations. ,e French adverb bientôt (‘soon’) is complicated, involving anon-temporal component similar to ‘nearly’ or ‘almost’, but the futurate CP is clearlyindependent of this component. Replacing bientôt with dans une heure (‘in an hour’),similar meanings are licensed, with the metalinguistic reading clearly triggered. ,espeaker communicates that in the time considered, she will be able to declare that anew situation is the case (J’ai terminé dans une heure; Dans une heure, le président estsorti (‘I .nish-CP in an hour’, ‘In an hour the President leave-CP’).

So far, it appears that the futurate CP belongs to the broader category of perfect-CP (‘passé composé accompli’), since it triggers a resulting state of a/airs, as does theEnglish present perfect, contrarily to narrative/anterior-CP, which only denotes even-tualities, as does any other perfective tense. ,is assumption is easily testable.

Inserting a future adverb in a narrative sequence with the CP should either makethe sequence odd or force a reinterpretation where the whole narration gives rise tosome higher-order resulting state (i.e. a result of the whole story). ,us only utterancescontributing to the description of a common resulting state should be able to showboth a narration and a resulting state. As a consequence, it is in turn predictable thatthe details in the narration that do not relevantly contribute to the main story shouldsimply block the futurate interpretation of the CP and make the sequence odd.

As predicted in (22), the fact that the passengers walk towards the exit does notcontribute to the main steps of the story and thus the sequence cannot give rise toa relevant common resulting state. With the future adverb, a futurate-CP, that is, aperfect reading in the future, is mandatory, which makes the sequence pragmaticallyunnatural:

(22) ? Dans une heure, l’avion a atterri, les passagers sont descendus, ils se sont dirigésvers la sortie de l’aéroport et sont montés dans l’autocar.In an hour, the airplane land-CP, the passengers get-CP out, they walk-CPtowards the airport exit and get-CP in the bus.

Upon taking this element (the passengers walk to the exit) out of the sequence, asin (23), the sequence becomes relevantly interpretable as conveying a meaning of afuturate resulting state such as, for example, the one indicated within brackets:

(23) Dans une heure, l’avion a atterri, les passagers sont descendus et sont montés dansl’autocar (et nous pouvons nous reposer avec les autres collègues de l’agence devoyage).

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In an hour, the airplane land-CP, the passengers get-CP out and get-CP in thebus (and we can rest with the other colleagues of the travel agency).

.. restrictions

A number of situations seem to block the futurate-CP.First, quite obviously, an utterance from which no resulting state is inferable will

not allow the combination with a future adverb, since, as we saw above, a future read-ing of the CP is necessarily perfect/resultative. As we saw with (22), this happens, forexample, because of a constraint imposing relevance on anteriority/narration. ,ereare, however, other types of constraints that must be examined.

Non-agentive and atelic predicates seem, at .rst sight, to raise problems with futu-rate CP utterances, whereas they are perfectly .ne with the anterior future tense (AF):

(24) Demain, il aura pluTomorrow, it rain-AF

(25) (?) Demain, il a pluTomorrow, it rain-CP

Vuillaume (2000) suggests that the futurate CP is incompatible with atelic predicates;Desclés and Guentchéva consider that it is speci.cally with stative predicates thatthe futurate CP is incompatible. ,us predicates such as être heureux, chaud, froid,amoureux, avoir chaud (‘be happy/warm/cold/in love/hot’) etc. are predicted to beincompatible with the futurate CP.

In fact, the reason for such incompatibilities might be more pragmatic than aspec-tual, that is, more tied to the complexity of inference rather than to the speci.c typeof eventuality involved.

Perfect CP sentences with non-stative predicates convey resulting states as implica-tures grounded on natural causal relations: with a CP utterance asserting rain in thepast, an implicature true in the present like the ground is wet is conveyed; with J’aimangé (‘I eat-CP’), roughly equivalent to I have eaten, an implicature like the speakeris in satiety is inferred; and so forth. But states do not normally cause other states,so that with stative predicates, resulting states can only be inferred through a morecomplex inference, usually in the form of the negation of the predicate or a higherlevel consequence of some state being the case in the past. For example, Pierre a étéheureux (‘Pierre be-CP happy’, ‘Pierre has been happy’), might typically convey eitherthe implicature that Pierre is not happy at speech time, or, at another conceptual level,that Pierre is now in peace, that his life was worth living, or any other state relatedwith having known happiness in one’s life.

Deriving a state from another state implies a complex type of inference, and it isgenerally irrelevant or too costly to apprehend such a state from a future perspective.

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Hence it is even weird to do it with an anterior future as in (26), and of course all themore bizarre to do it with a futurate CP as in (27):

(26) ? Demain, Pierre aura été heureuxTomorrow, Pierre be-AF happy

(27) ?? Demain, Pierre a été heureuxTomorrow, Pierre be-CP happy

For (27) to be interpreted, the hearer should be able to access a strange representationin which it would be relevant to talk about Pierre having been happy from tomorrow’sperspective.

We will return to activities and agentivity when we elaborate on (25) later in thechapter. For the time being, we observe that events too can seem to be at odds withthe use of the CP and a future adverb:

(28) (?) Dans quelques mois tout au plus, l’Europe s’est !nancièrement écroulée.In a few months at most, Europe .nancially crash-CP.

(29) (?) Dans dix jours, j’ai acheté des cigarettes.In ten days, I buy-CP cigrarettes.

Since futurate-CP utterances are based on perfect readings of the CP, a comparisonbetween the futurate-CP and futurate presents may be helpful: it may be that the futu-rate CP is a perfect variant of futurate presents and thus that it has the same conditionsof use. ,e observation by Dowty (1979: 156) that the futurate present works only whensome planning is envisaged apparently applies to French (Vet 1994). ,is explains whynon-agentive predicates and otherwise unpredictable events are also ruled out with thefuturate present in French. Examples (30) and (31) are variants of the original examplesby Dowty:

(30) Demain, les All Blacks jouent contre la France.Tomorrow, the All Blacks play against France.

(31) !Demain, les All Blacks jouent bien.!Tomorrow, the All Blacks play well.

,is explains as well the apparent oddness of (25) (rain cannot be planned, it canonly be predicted), of (28) (a .nancial crisis is not a plan) and of (29) (planning tobuy cigarettes in a ten-days term is pragmatically bizarre). On the contrary, typicalexamples such as (1) represent a situation that clearly resorts to a cognitive scheme ofplanning.

,is also explains why many verbs forming futurate CP utterances are aspectualones. ,ere are, however, also other reasons for this: semantically, aspectual verbsmark precisely the emergence of a new state of a/airs; hence they are ready-madefor communicating the emergence of a resulting state.

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,is being said, the notion of planning has to be understood somewhat loosely.Whereas rain cannot be planned, but possibly predicted with some degree of uncer-tainty on the basis of observations, (32) appears to be natural in French at least:

(32) Demain, il pleut.Tomorrow, it rains.

,e interesting fact is that (32) looks far more natural than (25) in unspeci.ed contexts.,us, even loosened planning will not tell us everything about the futurate CP.

Similarly, (33) looks much easier than (29):

(33) Dans dix jours, j’achète des cigarettes.In ten days, I buy cigarettes.

Conversely, even telic utterances that should be very good candidates for planningseem odd with the futurate-CP:

(34) ? Demain, nous nous sommes rendus sur place comme prévu.Tomorrow, we get-CP there as planned.

,e constraints that apply to the futurate CP are thus stronger than those applying tofuturate presents, and are not exhausted by the notion of planning. Our assumptionis that futurate CP utterances must convey relevance in the present, which is achievedthrough the inference of practical consequences inferred from the situation envisagedin the future.

.. relevance in the present with futuratecp utterances

Even though futurate CP utterances imply a deictic shi-, they are still about thepresent in some way, that is, they convey information that is readily useful in the actualmoment of speech.

We notice that well-formed utterances with the futurate CP indeed allow the hearerto draw relevant conclusions about what should be done in the present, consideringthat what is predicted will happen. For example, (1) and (10) both suggest that thereare good reasons to wait, in the present, without impatience, in the perspective ofthe imminent realization of the situation. In (11), the relevance of the utterance in thepresent can be about being reassured that the current work is worth pursuing (or start-ing) in the perspective of an achievement (.nishing the thesis). In (21), relevance inthe present resides in the fact that if it is true tomorrow that the slater has achievedhis work, then we will be able to go, and we can thus adopt an attitude in the presentwhich is consistent with this perspective (prepare the luggage, or even get psycholog-ically prepared). Similarly, (23) invites rejoicing in view of the end of drudgery (even

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though the inference is easier when the context is spelled out: ‘we can rest’). ,e futurestate of a/airs serves as a reason to adopt an attitude in the present (being patient, reas-sured, comforted . . .) which, in turn, invites some behaviour (wait, get prepared . . .),seen as an appropriate move in the perspective of what is going to happen.

Futurate CP utterances, we thus claim, trigger the inference of a deontic-practicalmodality in the present, that is, a modality about what attitude should be adopted andwhat practical actions need to be performed, in view of the situation actually happen-ing in the future.

,is pragmatic e/ect is achieved through an allocentric representation of a state ofa/airs, envisaged from a shi-ed viewpoint in the future where it is declared true.

,e question that arises then is why this complex pragmatic e/ect obtains with thefuturate CP but not with the anterior future. ,e answer, we suggest, is that an allocen-tric representation of the future simulates a reality, whereas an egocentric represen-tation of the future—as o/ered by the anterior future—only represents a predictionas such.

,ere is indeed a particular epistemic e/ect with representing in the future a situa-tion as if it were past, which the futurate-CP does. ,is mechanism converts a futureeventuality into a simulation of a past fact, hence considered true from that pointof view.

,e future tense o-en bears a Javour of uncertainty, since it marks a prediction onthe basis of present facts, while the past is linked to factuality and truth. ,e futurateCP, in that view, communicates that an event situated in an uncertain future has tobe seen as past, hence true, from an alternative temporal perspective. ,e futurateCP is therefore a linguistic instrument that allows us to declare predictions of truthsin the future with particular e;ciency. What we say is that this epistemic value ofcertainty attached to futurate-CP utterances requires us in return to draw deontic-practical modal inferences in the very present (similar e/ects arise with the epistemicfuture in French; see Morency and de Saussure 2012).

However, the communication of a deontic-practical modality in the present with afuturate CP utterance is of course derived as an implicature: there is nothing in thepropositional form of the utterance that conveys it semantically. An inference like bepatient now (because the wait won’t be long) is drawn by the hearer in order to obtainmore information than that of a simple prediction in the future, which would be moreeconomically achieved with a future or an anterior future utterance. In that sense, afuturate-CP is more e/ortful to interpret than an anterior future but provides relevantcompensation in the communication of a speci.c modality in the present.

,is modality being a pragmatic inference, it is bound to the context, in particularto contextual expectations. ,erefore, contextual assumptions relating to the impact ofthe projected situation in the very present must be available, otherwise the search forrelevance fails. ,is is why it can seem that an utterance like (34) (Demain nous noussommes rendus sur place comme prévu) is odd: in ordinary contexts, such an utterance

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does not seem to be able to convey any implicit meaning about what conduct shouldbe adopted in the present. But according to our analysis, it should not be consideredodd per se: a particular context should su;ce to make sense of it and lead to con-clusions about the present, for example that we have to act now in the perspective ofnot changing our plans despite some other people wanting us to, or whatever otherpossibility.

Still, some cases mentioned earlier call for an explanation:

(25) (?) Demain, il a pluTomorrow, it rain-CP

(28) (?) Dans quelques mois tout au plus, l’Europe s’est !nancièrement écroulée.In a few months at most, Europe .nancially crash-CP.

(29) (?) Dans dix jours, j’ai acheté des cigarettes.In ten days, I buy-CP cigrarettes.

Utterances (25) and (28) are non-agentive and are about eventualities that cannot beplanned. Sentence (29) is completely compatible with planning but apparently bizarrenonetheless. Our line of argument is, however, that it is only upon super.cial exami-nation that they look strange.

If such utterances seem unnatural, we suggest, it is once again only because of thedi;culty of thinking about a context that leads to the inference of a deontic-practicalmodality in the present. ,e di;culty is thus pragmatic, so that our prediction is thatsuch utterances are possible in French if the right context is available. For example,a farmer, who recently listened to the weather forecast, might well make use of (25)in order to reassure his neighbour and convince him to leave his wetting equipmentand have a drink instead: Allez, demain il a plu, tes salades sont sauvées! (‘All right,tomorrow it rain-CP, your lettuces are saved!’). Example (29) can a-er all very well beuttered by a person happy at the prospect of buying cigarettes in ten days, for whateverreason (which any smoker betting on a period of abstinence understands). Sentence(28) is also very likely in a context where a .nancial adviser tries to persuade someoneto change euros into Swiss francs before it is too late.11

In short, utterances with the futurate-CP are easily interpretable if a pragmatic con-dition is satis.ed: the inference of a deontic-practical modality in the present. ,efuturate CP thus has the following meaning: a state of a/airs is projected as true at afuture allocentric (shi-ed deictic) point, resulting from some eventuality prior to thatpoint, triggers a contextual inference about the attitude that needs to be adopted in thepresent in view of that situation being true in the future. ,e shi-ed representation has

11 It is also a prediction of our hypothesis that futurate CP utterances have a particular persuasivee;ciency, but this remains to be further elaborated and tested.

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a strong epistemic weight in that it manifests that the situation is known to be true; inturn, it triggers a deontic-practical modality in the present.

,ere are ways to empirically test this assumption: the inference about the deontic-practical attitude in the present should be unproblematically cancellable with the ante-rior future but such a cancellation should in turn make the utterance with the futurateCP pragmatically unnatural, if the ultimate motivation of the futurate CP is the infer-ence.12 ,is is not to say that the implicature is not cancellable at all (which would raiseother problems) but that the motivation for the CP would be lost, hence expectationsof relevance would be le- unsatis.ed.

We thus construct the following pair of sequences, and observe that the predictionis correct: (35), with the anterior future, accepts the cancellation of modal implica-ture, whereas (36), with the futurate CP, is unnatural. ,e context is the following: ata garage, the mechanic tells the customer:

(35) Demain, j’aurai réparé votre voiture, mais nous serons fermés et il faudra revenirmardiTomorrow, I .x-AF your car, but we will be closed and you’ll need to come backon Tuesday.

(36) Demain, j’ai réparé votre voiture, ??mais nous serons fermés13 et il faudra revenirmardi.Tomorrow, I .x-CP your car, but we will be closed and you’ll need to come backon Tuesday.

In (36), the futurate CP utterance incites the hearer to get ready for the state of a/airswhere the car is available tomorrow, but then this expectation is cancelled by the sec-ond sentence, which makes the sequence unnatural. On the contrary, the anteriorfuture has a concessive Javour unavailable with the CP. We take this to be empiricalevidence supporting our assumption.

. FURTHER CONSIDERATIONSAND CONCLUDING REMARKS

Some points need further elaboration and should be examined in more detail.First, we note that in futurate-CP utterances the future adverbial usually appears in

a pre-verbal position (o-en the initial position). ,e reason for this is, we think, prag-matic again. Adverbial anteposition is a pragmatic facilitation for the interpretationof the CP as future without re-interpretation. In e/ect, the temporality indicated by

12 As a corollary, we predict that a futurate CP with cancellation should generate a conJict experimen-tally observable as event-related brain potentials (ERPs).

13 ,e present tense would not make the sequence better; therefore sequence of tense has no impacthere.

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an adverb cannot be accommodated under the pressure of a conJicting temporalityindicated by the tense,14 so that when an adverbial sets the temporal reference in thefuture, the CP is accommodated to .t with it; otherwise, a re-interpretation of the CPpredicate occurs.15

,e interesting thing is, however, that when the adverb occupies a postverbal posi-tion, as in (37), other pragmatic e/ects occur:

(37) J’ai !ni dans dix minutesI .nish-CP in ten minutes

Sentence (37) is only possible if it is mutually manifest that the speaker has not yet.nished at S (the non-.nishing at S is then presupposed), contrarily to what happenswhen the adverb is in a preverbal position (in which case, as mentioned above, all sit-uations are possible).16 It also seems that in such a case the adverb signals the timewhere E (‘.nish’) is true, hence the le- bound of the resulting state, rather than sig-nalling that the resulting state itself is true at S' regardless of the time of the eventuality.,e reasons for this should be investigated further.

Second, although the futurate CP, as we said, appears mostly with aspectual verbsof termination (which .ts well with our analysis, since termination is a particularlyexplicit trigger for the representation of a new state), inchoative aspectual verbs areperfectly natural too in an appropriate context. For example, (38) is natural if utteredby a child trying to reassure his parents that he will really soon start to read the book,and (39) can be said by a contractor in order to invite the hearer to get ready (now) forthe works starting tomorrow:

(38) Demain, j’ai commencé mon livre.Tomorrow, I start-CP [reading] my book.

(39) Demain, le chantier a commencé.Tomorrow, the work begin-CP.

A typical continuation of (38) or (39) is ‘I promise’; the perlocutionaory e/ect of theutterance is, again, to trigger with the futurate CP a new attitude, more appropriateto the world as it will be tomorrow. Utterance (38) conveys the implicature that theparents can be reassured and adapt now to the projected situation (not being angry).Sentence (39), said by a contractor will typically reassure the landlord that the workswill truly .nally start.

14 ,is holds at least for French; see de Saussure () for a more pragmatic account.15 Again, an assumption which is experimentally testable.16 Two remarks: (i) interestingly, it seems that this restriction also applies to the anterior future in French;

(ii) the presupposition of non-accomplishment may be cancelled by contextual features and intonation, butwe cannot pursue this investigation here.

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,ird, it may seem that the situation described with a futurate CP is o-en a desir-able one, but this is actually not the case. Nothing actually forbids a clearly undesir-able situation being represented with the futurate CP, provided that a deontic-practicalmodality is relevant in the present. One such example is (40):

(40) Dans un mois le Portugal a fait faillite, malheureusement.17

In a month, Portugal go-CP bankrupt unfortunately.

Typically, (40) implicates that something has to be done to adapt to the new situation.,at the new situation is desirable or deplorable is altogether another question. ,efuturate CP, in sum, calls for the hearer to adapt his anticipations.

One more word should be said about the notion of allocentric projection in relationto ,eory of Mind (ToM). ,ere are many cases in language involving some type ofperspectival shi-,18 either as ‘allocentric’ representations, as Damourette and Pichon(1911–36) put it, or as ‘interpretive use’ of language, as Sperber and Wilson (1995) say.For Sperber and Wilson, cases of interpretive use of language are representations ofother representations, the latter representation being attributed to an instance distinctfrom the speaker at S. Typical of these are reported speech and thought, in particularfree indirect speech and, following Sperber and Wilson, irony as a case of ‘mention’.Damourette and Pichon focused, on the contrary, on cases where the interlocutorsmust adopt a particular point of view, distinct from that of the speaker at S. In inter-pretive uses, a representation is embedded into another higher-level representation.With allocentric uses of language, things are unclear in this respect, since it is rather aquestion of changing points of view. Other examples of allocentric uses of langage trig-gered by tenses are (see de Saussure 2013 for a development): counterfactual imperfec-tive past utterances (such as, in French, Une minute de plus et le train déraillait, whichtranslates as ‘One more minute and the train would have derailed’ but feels rather like‘Let’s imagine we are one minute later: the train derails’), and epistemic futures (suchas Ce sera le facteur uttered when the doorbell rings (‘that will be the mailman’), whichfeels like ‘Let’s imagine what happens when I check who rang: it is the mailman’). ,efuturate CP clearly belongs to this category: it is disputable that futurate CP utter-ances fully ‘represent another representation’ in a similar way as reported speech orirony do. ,is is probably related to a di/erence in the actual grasping of the utter-ance by the addressee: with reported speech or thought, it conforms to the intuitionthat there is a representation of another representation; with irony too, such e/ects ofrepresenting someone else’s thought arise.19 But futurate-CP utterances seem rather

17 I thank Gilles Cominboeuf for this example.18 See also the notion of perspectival thought in Recanati ().19 Clark and Gerrig () have suggested that irony implies a kind of pretence, which would be closer to

simulation than to metarepresentation. For more recent elaborations, see Kumon-Nakamura et al. ().For counter-arguments, see Sperber () and Wilson (). See also de Saussure and Schulz () forrelated considerations.

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a transposition in another time (a future possible world) of a representation, with-out the complex embedding of representations implied by a metarepresentation as inirony or reported speech or thought. ,is would plead for a simulation-like process àla Damourette and Pichon with the futurate-CP rather than for a theory–theory typeof process as can be the case with metarepresentations.

We suggested in this chapter that the futurate CP triggers an allocentric projectionof the deictic present point S in the future indicated by the adverb and that this allows arepresentation of the eventuality with a higher level of certainty on the epistemic scalethan with a future tense. We also suggested that the motivation for using a futurate CP,in comparison with the anterior future, is to communicate a speci.c implicature aboutwhat attitude should be adopted in the very present of speech and what actions shouldbe performed now (a deontic-practical modality). We hypothesized that these prag-matic e/ects are obtained through the simulation of a future state of a/airs envisagedas past, therefore true.

Documents

Future reference and current relevance with the french composed past (2nd uncorrected proofs)