Astheure und maintenant im Französischen Nordamerikas im Vergleich

Eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung

Abstract

The article examines the use of the French temporal adverbs astheure and maintenant in the French-speaking part of North America. Based on an analysis of dictionary entries of the adverb astheure, the article initially describes its distribution in France and North America, where astheure is by far more often used than in France. The second part of the article compares the usage of astheure and maintenant in North America on the basis of a corpus study. This study, which is based on the three corpora FRAN, Varitext and CFPQ, clearly shows that the two adverbs can largely be seen as synonyms, but that there is an important difference with regard to their variational status: Whereas maintenant is used in all varieties, astheure proves to be an element of the language of proximity in North American French.