Le futur antérieur périphrastique

Abstract

Unlike the competition between futur simple (il pleuvra) and futur périphrastique (il va pleuvoir), the parallel analytical pair including futur antérieur (il aura plu) and the corresponding periphrastic form (il va avoir plu) has been largely neglected by linguists. This paper contributes to fill the gap and pursues two aims. First, a description of the values in language of the future antérieur (FA) and its periphrastic counterpart (FAP) based on Azzopardi and Bres (2017) will be provided. Second, on the basis of corpora, a quantitative and qualitative overview of the actual use of both forms will be provided. It will be concluded that the scarcity of the FAP results from the fact that it only competes with one of the three possible configurations of the FA, although it is favoured in some cotexts (telic processes and temporal indications) and contexts (electronic writing, Northern American French).