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 cla uses, that is, a reading on which the proposition expressed by the subordin ate clause is neither true nor false. The analysis is based on French lingu istic material. The paper attempts to demonstrate that the suspended readin g of the subordinate clause is intrinsically related to the intentional rea ding of the sentence, that is, a reading on which the sentence is introduce d by an implicit intentional propositional attitude. The analysis shows tha t, in sentences referring to the past, the inference of the intentional att itude is brought about by three types of lexical and/or syntactic marker, w hich allows us to divide the sentences that trigger the suspended reading i nto three categories. The paper accounts for the cases of ambiguity and lis ts the readings that are allowed by each type of ambiguous sentence. The po sition defended is that avant que 'before' clauses, like other temporal cla uses, do express a presupposition. The phenomenon known as "presupposition suspension" is due to the fact that the lexical content of the connective a llows the presupposition to be modalized by a propositional attitude.