La formule "je t’aime" et ses fonctions pragmatiques
The Formula "je t’aime" and Its Pragmatic Functions

Summary/Abstract: The article is a study that proposes a semantic-pragmatic description of the I love you formula. It first presents the formula’s general properties, including its degree of fixation, syntactic autonomy, meaning, and polyfunctional character. Then, particular attention is paid to the different values it can have as a direct or indirect act in a specific interactional framework. The study of the corpus of this work allowed us to identify two types of use of the above-mentioned formula: prototypical and non-prototypical use. In the first case, I love you is used to perform either an expressive or an assertive act. In the second case, it is an indirect act whose interpretation is inferred from the cotext. The analysis also highlights the social nature of interactions and the significance of the interactional context for interpreting the types of language acts in which the I love you formula occurs.

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