Voronina M. Compound Sentences as Speech Acts in Modern French

This thesis presents a study of compound sentences (CS) in Modern French that takes into account the interaction of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. They are analysed from the double nomination theory as a sign in the language system and as its speech realizations. A typical CS model comprises structurally and semantically equal predicative parts joined by a coordinating conjunction. The elementary sentences which correlate with the predicative parts of a CS can have similar (the monocommunicative type of a CS) or different communicative goals (the polycommunicative type of a CS). The classification of CS according to their communicative goals and the analysis of semantic relations between clauses have allowed to single out potentially monosemantic CS models with the relations of semantic equality or semantic dependence between their predicative parts, as well as polysemantic models with both kinds of semantic relations. Given different semantic relations between predicative parts of CS, the latter fall into complex and simple speech acts.