Aspect and Discourse Function: The French Simple past in Newspaper Usage

Analysis has shown that discourse function is an essential facet of the meaning of grammatical elements; e.g. that perfective and imperfective aspect manifest discourse foregrounding and backgrounding. By focusing on the French S[imple] P[ast] and by analysing newspaper usage, we demonstrate that foregrounding is one result of two properties inherent to SP: DETACHMENT within a universe of discourse of a DIMENSIONALIZED FIGURE. But SP has other, quite different, discourse functions, in addition to important cognitive/referential, expressive, and pragmatic meanings-all of which are also attributable to detachment and dimensionalization. Thus SP (and, by extension, verbal grammatical categories in general) manifests a complex variety of functions which must be accounted for by any complete study. Discourse analysis should not supplant, but rather complement, more traditional semantic analysis.