Pierrette Thibault

Semantic overlaps of French modal expressions

Although there is no consensus on whether French has any true modal auxiliary, devoir ‘must’ is one of the very few possible candidates. Most studies of devoir concentrate on criteria for distinguishing its epistemic and root semantic values, but some also explore the subtle semantic nuances it conveys depending on context. Here, we identify discrete meanings through the analysis of semantic overlaps between devoir and other French modal expressions, such as probablement ‘probably’, etre suppose ‘to be supposed to’, or falloir ‘ought to’. The analysis of data from two corpora on Montreal French, collected in 1971 and 1984, shows that: 1. There is only one root semantic value exclusively associated with devoir , namely, the notion of desirability (as in the English ‘should’). 2. There are different patterns of use of the competing modal expressions within each semantic field analyzed, according to the social class of the speaker. Moreover, some patterns characterizing a specific social group are acquired relatively late.