Les structures des énoncés à force illocutoire impérative en français moderne un traitement minimaliste

Abstract

This dissertation examines the syntactic structures underlying three types of imperatives in spoken French: Class A or non-verbal imperatives of the type Au lit! (PP), Plus blondes, les méches (AdjP), Doucement! (AdvP). Feu! (NP); Class B or uninflected verbal imperatives such as Ne pas marcher sur la pelouse ; and Class C or inflected verbal imperatives including the subject-less forms canonically termed imperatives (Arrête!), subjunctive forms (Que tu viennes pas to plaindre après! ) and a variety of indicative forms having an explicit subject (Tu vas me faire ça tout de suite). Working in a Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995), we show that the common illocutionary force shared by this broad range of grammatical structures can be attributed to the interaction of three features: a [dyn]amic feature, an [irr]ealis feature and a [2]nd person feature. We argue (pace Platzack & Rosengren 1997/1998, and others) that the imperative illocutionary force of all of these utterance types is an operator, which we situate in the highest structural position, the specifier of ForceP (Rizzi 1997). The traces left by feature checking of the three features constitute the variables which license the operator, thus allowing imperative illocutionary force to apply to the utterance. We argue further for a truncated structure for Class A and Class B imperatives, the former lacking VP and the projections associated with it (notably NegP) and the latter lacking such projections as FinP (Rizzi 1997). Our analysis allows us to account syntactically for commonalities amongst a broad range of data, many of which have traditionally been relegated to the field of pragmatics or marginalized as 'stylistic' effects.