This study investigates the variation in the expression of Future Temporal Reference in text messages in Belgian and Québécois French. Three variants are considered: the Futurate Present, the Synthetic Future and the Analytic Future. The results of multivariate analyses show that the use of the Futurate Present does not appear to be subject to dialectal variation: both communities use this variant at similar rates, and the use of the variant is constrained by the same linguistic factors. The two dialects show differences in their choice of the Synthetic vs the Analytic Future. Unlike Québécois French, Belgian French strongly favours the Synthetic Future. The two dialects also differ with respect to the linguistic constraints in effect. Our analysis shows the need to explore the relationship between variants, and to distinguish between Covert T (realized as Present tense) and Overt T (either Synthetic or Analytic Future). Our results point toward the hybrid nature of text messages: while our results show patterns of use in line with oral/conversational corpora as reflected by the dialectal variation observed, text messages are not exempt from the influence of written French, as shown by the use of Synthetic Future forms in affirmative sentences in the Québec corpus.

中文翻译：

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在比利时和魁北克发短信给未来：现在很重要

本研究调查比利时和魁北克法语文本消息中未来时间参考表达的变化。考虑了三个变体：未来的现在、综合的未来和分析的未来。多变量分析的结果表明，未来现在的使用似乎不受方言变化的影响：两个社区以相似的比率使用这种变体，并且该变体的使用受到相同语言因素的限制。这两种方言在选择综合未来与分析未来方面表现出差异。与魁北克法语不同，比利时法语强烈支持合成未来。这两种方言在有效的语言限制方面也有所不同。我们的分析表明需要探索变体之间的关系，并区分隐蔽 T（实现为现在时）和显性 T（综合未来或分析未来）。我们的结果指向文本消息的混合性质：虽然我们的结果显示使用模式与观察到的方言变化所反映的口头/会话语料库一致，但文本消息并不能免除书面法语的影响，如使用所示魁北克语料库中肯定句中的合成未来形式。