Hladka V. Linguistic syncretism of interrogative and relative pronouns in French: diachronic and synchronism

The thesis focuses on a many-sided system analysis of the syncretism in interrogative and relative pronouns in French, which considers their lexico-grammatical peculiarities and reveals the features of their communicative and pragmatic functioning. The research is based on the assumption that the principle reason for polyfunctional character of interrogative and relative pronouns "qui", "que", "quoi", "quel" is their syncretic nature, which is formed by Indo-European roots. The origin and development of linguistic syncretism of interrogative and relative pronouns are stipulated by the factors of diachronic (the origin of interrogative and relative pronouns in Indo-European language and their particular development in French) and synchronic (communicative and pragmatic functioning in modern discourse) plans.