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Article dans une revue Journal of Romance Studies Année : 2015

Talking about counterfactual worlds: A comparative study of French and Spanish

Parlons de l'irréalisé : étude translinguistique français-espagnol

Résumé

Counterfactual thinking is a cognitive process in which reality is compared to an imagined view of what might have been. Previous studies in Linguistics have focused on the description of the conditional construction if P (then) Q. Our study aims to compare the grammatical devices used by thirty French native speakers and thirty Spanish native speakers. Participants were presented with a story that led to a particular outcome and were asked to provide alternative scenarios that might have prevented such an outcome from happening. Th e results showed (i) that counterfactuality is not expressed most frequently by conditional constructions and (ii) that the use of evaluative modal markers within the mutation core is a salient diff erence between French and Spanish. Th e minor role of conditional constructions suggests that the boundaries of conditionality as a conceptualization process need to be reconsidered within the realm of irreality. In addition, the frequency of evaluative modals in French suggests a preference for counterfactual scenarios that integrate an overt critical judgement from the speaker.
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Dates et versions

halshs-03330878, version 1 (03-09-2021)
halshs-03330878, version 2 (06-09-2021)

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Isabel Repiso. Talking about counterfactual worlds: A comparative study of French and Spanish. Journal of Romance Studies, 2015, 15 (1), pp.52-72. ⟨10.3828/jrs.15.1.52⟩. ⟨halshs-03330878v2⟩
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