Intentional relation and suspended reading of before clauses : The case of the French avant que

The aim of this paper is to account for the suspended reading of before' clauses, that is, a reading on which the proposition expressed by the subordinate clause is neither true nor false. The analysis is based on French linguistic material. The paper attempts to demonstrate that the suspended reading of the subordinate clause is intrinsically related to the intentional reading of the sentence, that is, a reading on which the sentence is introduced by an implicit intentional propositional attitude. The analysis shows that, in sentences referring to the past, the inference of the intentional attitude is brought about by three types of lexical and/or syntactic marker, which allows us to divide the sentences that trigger the suspended reading into three categories. The paper accounts for the cases of ambiguity and lists the readings that are allowed by each type of ambiguous sentence. The position defended is that avant que before' clauses, like other temporal clauses, do express a presupposition. The phenomenon known as presupposition suspension is due to the fact that the lexical content of the connective allows the presupposition to be modalized by a propositional attitude