Discursive Functions of French Modal Forms: What Can Correspondence Analysis Tell Us About Genre and Diachronic Variation?

Our aim is to describe discursive functions of a set of French modal forms by establishing their combinatory profiles based on their co-occurrence with different connectors. We then compare these profiles using correspondence analysis in order to find evidence of genre and diachronic variation. The use of these forms is explored in contexts of informative discourse within two distinctly different genres—contemporary written press and encyclopedic discourse—as well as within two diachronic spans.

This paper is an extended version of 2021 of the paper published in Actes JADT 2018, Roma: UniversItalia, pp. 668–675.