“Venir de + inf” in modern French: an analytic form or an analytic construction
Abstract
The aim of the study is to determine the grammatical status of the French verbal periphrasis “venir de + inf” in contemporary usage, drawing on a fixed set of external and internal criteria for identifying analytic verbal forms (including the existence of a synthetic counterpart, the substitutability by another tense form, the degree of semantic bleaching of the auxiliary component, and the loss of autonomy of the constituent elements). The article examines the grammatical semantics of the periphrasis, the degree of its grammaticalization as a unified syntactic structure, and the evolution of the verb “venir” within the construction from an independent lexical verb of directed motion into an auxiliary element of an analytic construction. The novelty of the present study lies in its findings. A comprehensive analysis of the semantics and functioning of the periphrasis “venir de + inf” based on contemporary language data (the 19th-21st-century subcorpus of the French national corpus Frantext) has led to the conclusion that, despite a high degree of grammaticalization and analyticity (fixed word order, the loss of the spatial semantics by “venir”, broadened combinatorial possibilities), the construction cannot be classified as an analytic verbal form, since in the majority of the examined contexts it can be replaced by other forms expressing anteriority. The present study is the first to classify “venir de + inf” as a grammaticalized construction at a transitional stage of the evolution ‘aspect → taxis → tense’, displaying a tendency toward the integration of the forms with “venir” in the present and imperfect forms into the indicative past tense system.