Constructing futurity: A contrastive approach to L1 and L2 Dutch and French

Context – Traditional grammar (Fleishman 1982) and constructional analyses of the future in other languages, largely concentrate on verbal predications (Berghs 2010, Hilpert 2008) as locus of futurity. Furthermore, previous research in L1 (Dabrowska 2012) and L2 (Deknop et al. fc./2016) has shown individual productive variance in constructional profiles and lexical knowledge in adult speakers.
Objective –This talk proposes a contrastive approach to describing constructional profiles and a conceptual network for futurity in L1 and advanced learners L2 Dutch and French (B1-C1 in CEFR).
Corpus and procedure – The corpus is composed of elicited spoken Dutch and French, based on a questionnaire imposed on 20 L1/L2 speakers, who are asked questions about their future professional future in their mothertongue and thereafter in L2 Dutch or French (40 interactions). The questions combine different verb and nominal constructions for future time reference and are based on a usage-based construction network of futurity (AUTHOR 2009, 2012) inspired by Langacker’s (2008) extended epistemic model. This conceptual CxG network future time includes variation in tense and epistemic modality.
(Expected) results – We describe and measure the constructional L1 and L2 profiles, comparing/correlating them as to their productivity for futurity in L1/L2. There are two important extensions of previous studies on future constructions. (1) The future is conceived at the interface between different predication types. (2) Future talk is taken at the level of larger-than-clause interaction (Nikiforidou 2011; Östman 2004). (3) Non-epistemic modality and complex clauses encode future time. (4) The descriptive approach leads to guidelines for teaching more authentic L2 constructions for futurity based on L1 constructions beyond the traditional scope of verbs and/or modes in a coherent conceptual framework.