Andrus L. Linguistic and pragmatic characteristics of interrogative sentences in modern French.

The thesis is devoted to linguistic and pragmatic analysis of interrogative sentences in modern French. The paper aims to determine and to describe the fundamental role of the category of "interrogation" in communication, to define the main stages of evolution of French questions as well as different methods of their research. The work examines structural and semantic peculiarities of French questions, based on the speaker's ignorance, and its actualization in a question. The analysis contains cognitive and semantic models of the dialogic unity of interrogative direct speech acts and interrogative implicatures taking into consideration the semantic construction that consists of 1) informational layers when communicator's competences are asked, 2) a referent, 3) a semantic lacuna, 4) a semantic filling of a slot. The pragmatic investigation of interrogative sentences determines the total number of factors which make interrogative speech acts felicitous, namely: interlocutors' communicative roles,type of communication, interlocutors' strategy and tactics. Furthermore, the research proves that the category of interrogation is a communicative notional nucleus of several speech genres as mass, philosophical, etc.