Contributions to the Study of the Imperative in Modern French

The French imperative is analyzed from a perspective uniting structural & semantic viewpoints that notes the performative nature of imperative enunciations. Three types of imperative structures are distinguished according to the speaker-hearer relationship represented: (1) the speaker addresses the imperative enunciation to himself acting as both its sender & recipient; (2) the imperative act is directed toward an identifiable recipient who is urged to perform certain acts by the sender; & (3) the speaker addresses the imperative enunciation toward an absent recipient who via an interlocutor present at the communicative situation. Morphological, periphrastic, interrogative, & futuristic types of imperatives are distinguished within class (2). Z. Dubiel