Imperfect: a tense indicating two procedures

Abstract

In this paper, the author investigates how the hypothesis presented in his article from 2015 (François Heenen, « Imparfait et Stéréotypes », Milli Mála 7, 2015) that imparfait encodes the instruction to infer a stereotyped representation (SR) of the event described by the utterance helps to understand certain temporal properties of this tense. The properties in question are the iterative reading without explicit markers, the reluctance for quantitative expressions specifying the number of occurrences and the retrograde temporal reading. The conclusion is that these properties are due to the fact that in order to perform the SR the interlocutor needs to determinate a fixed value of the event time. If the value is not made explicit by an adverb or another temporal expression, the interlocutor determinates it by inference choosing the moment which seems to him the most relevant. This pattern differs from the one imposed by the passé composé which relies much more on the coding-decoding process.

Keywords: Relevance theory, imperfective aspect, iterativity