The narrative construction va + infinitive in Contemporary French: A linguistic phoenix rising from its medieval ashes?

International audienceIn Old and Middle French (12th-16th centuries), va + inf. was used in narrations situated in the past. A similar usage of the periphrasis seemingly reappears and spreads in Contemporary French. However, we are not dealing with a linguistic resurrection: while the periphrasis appears in both cases in past contexts, the old construction was found in combination with past tenses whereas the new one is only found in present and future contexts. In this paper, we argue that the Contemporary narrative construction derives not from the old one, but from a metanarrative construction. Indeed, on the basis of its future interpretation, va + inf. allows the explicit or implicit organization of narration as an act, to anticipate on what is about to happen, to announce it through a hypernymic process. In that type of metanarrative construction, we have a form that - if it cannot yet be called narrative - approaches it through the projection of the time of events on the time of narration. Through the disappearance of all the markers of the narrative act, such as its personal, temporal and spatial deictics, we return to a narrative construction that gives the impression that we are in front of the sole line of events. In addition, the situations expressed by go-periphrases are not hypernyms anymore: they participate in the same line of events as the neighbouring situations in the present. Last but not least, they are understood as fully completed