Les « verbes savonnettes » : frottements et glissements sémantiques
“Soap verbs”: why do achievements such as “Il se casse la jambe” sound odd with the present tense?

Summary/Abstract: In the semantic analysis of tenses, the term event is frequently used. For example, following Reiche nba ch (1947: 288), many studies mention three “points”, within which (E) represents the “point of the event”. Besides, after Ma r t i n (1985: 25), it is commonly considered —often implicitly— that “the duration of the utterance can […] ideally be reduced to an instant t0 [i.e. a point], […] since within the utterance, truth conditions remain unchanged”. However, events as well as utterances take time (cf. the use of “intervals “ by G os sel i n, 1996). Here, I will analyze present tense utterances such as “le ballon franchit la ligne” (the ball crosses / is crossing the line), for which the described event (“achievement” for Ve nd le r, 1957; “instant realisation” for Vet t e r s, 1996) is shorter than the utterance that mentions it. I will show why the telic character (G a r ey, 1957) of achievements — unlike the other types of processes — makes it difficult to express an event contemporary to speech time since, contra against Ma r t i n’s (1985: 25) idealization, truth conditions vary throughout the utterance. Taking encoding as the basis (somewhat following L evelt, 1989), I will argue that truthcondition variation can naturally lead to the over-represented use of past tenses (Passé composé in French) in child language for the expression of telic events during early acquisition (cf. e.g. Wag ne r, 2009).

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