Dulcie M. Engel

Absolutely perfect? What is the status of ‘futur antérieur’?

Discussions of absolute and relative tense often focus on the futur anterieur (FA), which has variously been descibed as a tense, aspect and mood. In order to assess its place in the French verbal system, an analysis of a written media-based corpus was carried out. This revealed that, although relatively rare, FA functions as a tense-aspect with some modal values in a range of publications and a variety of newspaper text types. Furthermore, its use as an epistemic modal and as an equivalent to passe compose (PC), as discussed in recent literature, appears to fulfil a significant function in journalistic writing.

L'Écoute Du Langage The recipe for success: syntactic features of la chronique gastronomique

This paper examines some syntactic features in the discourse of food, and in particular recipes and cookery pieces published in the French press. It is argued that specific genres often display linguistic features related to the communicative function of the genre. Concentrating on the basic elements of the cooking process, that is, [irreversible process] [application of heat] [object-food] (Newman, 1975: 56), we examine the syntactic structure of NPs and VPs in French cookery writing in the press, which are characterised by complexity. Drawing parallels with the findings of Blanche-Benveniste (1995 a, b), we demonstrate how syntax can reflect function and meaning in a restricted text-type.