The Decline of the French Passé Simple - (Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory) by Emmanuelle Labeau (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book discusses the features of the alleged disappearance and uses over time of the passé simple, while testing its vitality against contemporary corpora. Now evolving as a stylistic marker, that tense has not yet been superseded.

Book Synopsis

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.