The Decline of the French Passé Simple

Download or read book The Decline of the French Passé Simple written by Emmanuelle Labeau and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-06-27 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The disappearance of the French simple past has been hotly debated since the early 20th century. This volume offers an overview of its fortunes since French emerged as a language, provides a description of its distinctive features, and discusses the potential impact of its supposed demise on the whole French verb system. These assumptions are tested against a large corpus of contemporary texts. The study concludes that, despite the erosion of its meaning and its increasingly infrequent use, the simple past tense is still used by native speakers in various contexts, and no single substitute has yet emerged. Nevertheless, the simple past may be evolving into a stylistic marker, making it fertile ground for future cross-linguistic studies.