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Tense and discourse topic in a corpus of Le Monde political articles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2005

MATTHEW MACNAMARA
MATTHEW MACNAMARA
Affiliation:
Department of French, National University of Ireland, Cork e-mail: mmacnamara@french.ucc.ie
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Abstract

The article seeks to account for the communicative values of tense choice in the main clauses of the sentences occurring in a corpus of eighty-two Le Monde articles dealing with French national politics. There are 2,706 such tense choices. A set of three discourse topics, the current situation, its antecedents and its implications, is identified as constituting the subject matter of the articles. All the tense choices are correlated to the evocation of one or other of these discourse topics. The relative frequencies of the three discourse topics are correlated to the context of production and reception of the journalistic texts. An appendix tabulates tense choice in each of eighty-two articles of the corpus.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 2005 , pp. 49 - 66
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

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