On the Expression of Epistemic Modality Through Verbal Forms in French and Italian and Equivalent Constructions in Serbian

Abstract

In the present work we start from the epistemic uses of future tenses (simple and anterior) in French and Italian in order to determine the degree of correspondence of their use in the respective languages, and, in a second stage of the work, to determine their equivalents in the Serbian language. Examination of the theoretical considerations concerning these two forms makes it clear that in both languages ​​the construction with the verb duty (It. dovere) is often concurrent with the forms studied. Therefore, the study of this construction has become a necessary part of this work.

Based on contrastive analysis, we analyse the examples extracted from a corpus consisting of French novels and their translations into Italian, Italian novels and their translations into French, and Serbian translations of all the works concerned.

The analysis of the examples of the corpus revealed the following:

The French epistemic future has a different distribution than the Italian epistemic future, the use of the French epistemic simple future having disappeared in the contemporary language (and being replaced by the epistemic duty) and the French epistemic future tense being considerably less frequent than the Italian epistemic future tense.

In Italian, the two forms of the epistemic future are still quite widespread.

In Serbian, the future tenses do not have the capacity to express the epistemic modality, and it is the construction mora da followed by the main conjugated verb (in the tense to which the supposition relates) which has imposed itself as the most frequent epistemic marker, and compatible with all degrees of the epistemic modal scale.