L’état de grammaticalisation des formes colloquiales o fi du mode présomptif roumain. Regard diachronique

Abstract

This paper presents a diachronic study of the grammaticalization of the colloquial future forms o fi in Romanian by means of a quantitative analysis. Five variables are used to measure the degree of grammaticalization of the above-mentioned forms in a corpus of 18 million words divided into four diachronic stages: Old Romanian (16th-18th centuries), Modern Romanian (19th century-mid 20th century), Contemporary Romanian (end of the 20th century-21st century). The results show a stabilisation of the epistemic use for Modern and Contemporary Romanian as well as a highly significant decrease in the overall use of the colloquial future forms in Contemporary Romanian. The enunciative mechanism of the colloquial future forms enable contextual meanings such as that of concessive, reportative and reinforcement usage. We argue that the emergence of these values is due to the increase of generic variation in Modern and Contemporary Romanian.

Keywords

• presumptive mood
• future tense
• colloquial future
• epistemic value
• concessive value
• diachronic analysis
• quantitative analysis
• Old Romanian
• Modern Romanian
• Contemporary Romanian