Le marquage flexionnel des structures conditionnelles : pour une approche constructionnelle

This paper aims at establishing that Hypothetical Conditional Structures (HCSs), and in general expressions exhibiting composite TAM marking (i.e. with a  combination of several TAM morphological exponents, or a combination of at least one TAM morphological exponent with constructional/syntactic elements) are never completely compositional, and always involve conventionnalized form/meaning pairings to some degree. On the basis of both synchronic and diachronic facts, it will be demonstrated that theories essentially trying to construe the meanings of HCSs (and other expressions with composite TAM marking) through the productive contextualization of e.g. tense markers, or other semantic/pragmatic productive strategies (e.g. semantic composition…), cannot account for obvious conventionnalization patterns in the grammar of HCSs. An alternative constructional account will be proposed in order to address these difficulties.