🗣️ 31. Speech acts

Saying something is doing something: to state, to ask, to order, to ask politely, to offer, to promise, to thank, to name. This chapter describes how French packages these acts: the four sentence types and the acts they usually perform, the imperative and the many other ways of making a directive, the requests that use vouloir and pouvoir, offers and promises, questions and their answers, greetings and thanks, performatives, and the speech-act verbs that report them. It ends with counts from the French treebanks (UD 2.18, 2026-11-06) and with what Mova does with French acts today.

Contents

1. The theory in short
2. Sentence types and the acts they perform
3. Directives: orders, requests, advice, invitations
4. The ladder of requests
5. Offers, promises and other commissives
6. Questions and answers as acts
7. Expressives: thanks, apologies, greetings, congratulations
8. Performatives and declarations
9. Indirect acts
10. Reporting speech acts
11. Counts in the French treebanks
12. Dialogue-act annotation
13. How Mova handles it

1. The theory in short

The theory of speech acts (Austin, Searle) separates three things in an utterance. The locution is the saying: the words and their sense. The illocution is what is done in saying it: asserting, asking, ordering, promising. The perlocution is what is brought about: convincing, annoying, being obeyed. Pragmatics studies the second. Searle's five classes of illocution are the usual frame:

The French term is acte de langage or acte de parole; the three levels are the acte locutoire, illocutoire and perlocutoire. The French literature adds the point that the force of an utterance is shaped by the face of the participants (see chapter 32): a bare order threatens the hearer's freedom, and French offers a graduated set of ways to soften it.

Two cautions. The same words do different acts in different contexts (Tu viens ? is a question about the hearer's plans, an invitation or an impatient order), and the form of the sentence is only a first guide to the act. And one utterance can do several acts at once: Je suis désolé, mais je ne peux pas venir is an apology, a refusal and an assertion.

2. Sentence types and the acts they perform

French has four grammatical sentence types, marked by the final punctuation, the word order, the verb mood and, in speech, the intonation:

The type is not the act. The mapping is conventional and has well-known exceptions:

The French grammarians have long seen that the mood system does not line up with the acts. Brunot (1922, brunot-1922-la-pensee-et-la) argues that the grammar of order, request and entreaty cannot be written as the grammar of the imperative mood, because the acts are done also by the future, the infinitive, nouns alone, conditionals and imperfects (see chapter 30). This chapter takes his approach: begin from the act, then list the forms.

3. Directives: orders, requests, advice, invitations

A directive is an utterance that tries to get the hearer to do something. French offers at least eight families of forms.

3.1 The imperative

The imperative has three forms, for tu, nous and vous, and no other person: Viens., Venons., Venez. (chapter 13). The tu form of the first group drops the -s (Parle !, but Parles-en, Vas-y). Clitics follow the positive imperative, joined by hyphens, and precede the negative one: Donne-le-moi but Ne me le donne pas (chapter 12). The negative imperative uses ne … pas with the verb between: N'hésitez pas à nous contacter. The pronominal verbs take the strong pronoun toi in the positive: Assieds-toi, Dépêche-toi, and the clitic te in the negative: Ne te dépêche pas.

What the imperative does depends on the context and the content, as in English:

The first-person plural imperative (Allons-y, Mettons que …, Voyons, Rappelons que …) is not a command to a group in which the speaker takes part but, in writing, a text-structuring device: Rappelons qu'à cet endroit, les automobilistes doivent rouler à 30 kilomètres-heure. (fr-ud-train_08428), Notons que cette mosaïque a été déposée en conservant les déformations de surface. (fr-ud-train_02611). It invites the reader to look at something together with the writer.

3.2 Other forms of order and instruction

The future deserves a note. In French a future with tu or vous is a firm, sometimes harsh, order, and a mild one in a friendly request (Tu me rappelleras demain ?). The context and the intonation decide. The merci de + infinitive (2 examples in GSD, both in notices and forum rules) is a formula of notices, customer service and forums; the older grammars we hold do not mention it, and it competes with veuillez + infinitive and prière de + infinitive, which stay in letters.

3.3 Advice, suggestion and invitation

Advice is a directive in the hearer's interest. French uses the imperative (Pensez à …), devoir in the conditional (Tu devrais …), il vaudrait mieux … and the question forms Pourquoi ne pas … ? (Pourquoi ne pas essayer ?) and Et si tu …? Suggestions that include the speaker use on and the conditional or imperfect: On pourrait y aller demain. Et si on allait au cinéma ? The imperfect here is notable: Et si on allait means "how about going", and is an invitation without a conditional clause (the English what if we went has the same past form). Si on y allait ? and Si tu venais avec nous ? are polite suggestions.

An invitation is a directive that is also a commissive in the sense that the speaker incurs an obligation: Venez dîner demain. Vous êtes invités à … Je t'invite. Si tu veux, viens avec nous. The reply Avec plaisir accepts, Je regrette, mais … declines. Among the conventions of a written invitation, the carton d'invitation has its own formulas (a le plaisir de vous inviter, R.S.V.P.: répondez s'il vous plaît).

3.4 Directive particles

French uses short words to adjust the force of an imperative:

S'il vous plaît is a petrified clause (if it pleases you) and may stand at the beginning, the end, or alone (as a call to a waiter). S'il te plaît is the tu form. The abbreviations SVP and STP appear in writing and in messages. In the four treebanks counted below s'il vous plaît occurs in only one sentence, because none of them is a corpus of requests.

4. The ladder of requests

A request is a directive that leaves the hearer free to refuse. French has a ladder of forms from direct to indirect. Each rung adds distance, and the choice between the rungs depends on the relation (tu or vous) and on the cost of the favour. The rungs below are in ascending order of politeness; a given context rules out some of them (a tu friend asked for the salt: rung 2 or 3 is normal, rung 7 is joking or cold).

The conditional in rungs 2, 5, 6 and 7 is the conditionnel de politesse ("conditional of politeness"): the verb is in a tense that says "if it were possible", and the request is presented as a hypothesis the hearer may decline. The imperfect in rung 8 (Je voulais vous demander …, Je me demandais si …) puts the speaker's wish in the past, as though it had been entertained earlier, and is even more indirect. Both are discussed in chapter 32.

A noteworthy point is the use of vouloir in the polite forms. Voulez-vous bien …? and Vous voudrez bien … mean "please" more than "do you want". The imperative veuillez is the one grammatical remainder: a fossil imperative of vouloir that means "please" and takes an infinitive. Voulez-vous in a plain question can also be a real question about the hearer's wish (Voulez-vous un café ?, an offer), so the same form can be a request or an offer according to who benefits.

Pouvoir also marks the request in two ways. A Pouvez-vous …? question is understood as a request when the action is within the hearer's power and is wanted by the speaker, and literal answers like Oui, je peux are a joke. Peut-on …?, Puis-je …? and Je peux …? ask for permission (Puis-je entrer ?, Je peux ?). The open research has classified the senses of the verb pouvoir in spoken French: Colli, Rossini & Battistelli (2024, colli-2024-modal-sense-classifier-french-modal) fine-tuned a BERT model for French (Flaubert-base-cased) to assign a sense to each occurrence in transcribed interviews and obtained an F1 of 0.94; the most frequent senses in the corpus were material possibility and ability, both within the alethic category, and not permission or request. The requests with pouvoir are a small part of its uses.

4.1 Responses to requests

A request projects a response, and the response also has a polite grammar. The preferred response is acceptance: Bien sûr. Volontiers. Avec plaisir. Pas de problème. Tout de suite. Voilà. (said when giving). A refusal is the dispreferred response and is hedged and delayed: Ah, je suis désolé, mais …, Malheureusement …, Je regrette, mais …, Euh … je ne sais pas si je pourrai. (chapter 38 takes up the markers). A direct refusal is Non. or Pas question ! The reply Non, merci (to an offer) and Si (to contradict a negative statement, see section 6) have their own forms.

5. Offers, promises and other commissives

A commissive commits the speaker to a future act. In French:

The immediate future with aller (Je vais le faire.) is the commonest way to announce a decision just made, and it is a weaker commitment than the simple future; it is the usual form of the offer Je vais t'aider. In the corpora counted below je vais has 6 occurrences in GSD (400 k tokens), 18 in ParisStories (43 k) and 32 in Rhapsodie (44 k), that is 0.15, 4.2 and 7.2 per 10 000 tokens: it is a spoken form, 28 to 48 times as frequent in speech as in the written web French of GSD.

French has a particular use of the question as offer, where the form Tu veux … ? / Vous voulez … ? asks about the hearer's wish and offers at the same time: Tu veux un café ? Compare Tu veux bien me passer le sel ?, a request with the same verb. The difference is who benefits: a thing the speaker has and the hearer may want is an offer; an action the speaker wants the hearer to do is a request. In the corpora, tu veux/vous voulez appears 9 times in GSD, 12 in ParisStories and 17 in Rhapsodie, mostly as ordinary questions about wishes or as the conditional-ellipsis si tu veux ("if you want"), which softens a suggestion (tu peux dormir sur mon épaule si tu veux, ParisStories_2022_3_petitDuCentre__14).

6. Questions and answers as acts

A question is a directive in Searle's classification: the speaker tries to get the hearer to provide information. French has the forms of chapter 26: rising intonation (Tu viens ?), est-ce que, inversion, and the question word in place or fronted. The choice of form signals the register: inversion is formal, intonation alone is informal, est-ce que is neutral. In spoken French the question form is also a cue to how planned the speech is. Taravella and colleagues (2022, taravella-2022-classification-automatique-de-questions-spontanees) separated spontaneous from prepared questions in transcribed oral French with a logistic regression and reached an F-measure of 0.75 for the binary task; the features that were significant were the number of tokens, the ratio of disfluencies, subject inversion, the initial position of the interrogative word, est-ce que and -t-il. In other words, est-ce que and inversion mark prepared questions (interviews, broadcast, lecture) and a short, disfluent form with the question word in place marks spontaneous ones.

What a question wants. Questions are not only requests for information. Barbedette & Eshkol-Taravella (2020, barbedette-2020-predire-automatiquement-les-intentions-du) classified the implicit intentions of questions in the transcribed oral corpora ESLO1 and ESLO2 (about 300 and 400 hours of recording) into three classes: opinion (AVIS), will (VOLONTÉ) and doubt (DOUTE); their classifier reached an F-measure of 0.62, which shows how hard the task is. The classes are those of a question that asks the hearer's view (Qu'est-ce que tu en penses ?), expresses a wish (On y va ?) or voices a doubt (C'est vrai ?). Müller & Plank (2024, muller-2024-indirectqa-understanding-indirect-answers-implicit, a non-commercial paper that informs but is not quoted) built a corpus of indirect answers to polar questions in French and Spanish subtitles, such as the answer "Islands are generally by the sea" to "An island? By the sea?", and note that such answers are natural in speech and still hard for systems.

6.1 Oui, non, si

French has three polar response particles, where English has two. Oui affirms a positive question or statement. Non denies a positive question or statement, or agrees with a negative one in some contexts. Si contradicts a negative statement or question:

Si can only answer a negative proposition; Mais si ! is the emphatic form. Pasquereau (2020, pasquereau-2020-polar-response-particles-french-as) studies the three particles in embedded clauses (Je crois que non, Je pense que oui) and argues from their sensitivity to finiteness and other diagnostics that they are remnants of ellipsis, not pure proforms: Je crois que non is Je crois qu'il ne joue pas du piano, reduced. For the pragmatics this means that oui, non, si stand for whole propositions, and that a system treating them as interjections loses the proposition. In the treebanks they are discourse or root or conj, depending on the position; si as an answer is rare (the word si is mostly the conjunction, 275 times in GSD).

A French answer is often a full or partial echo: Tu viens demain ? — Je viens. Tu as faim ? — Un peu. Il est parti ? — Il paraît. The echo of the verb is the usual way to say "yes" to a question with a modal or a rare verb. Counted on the treebanks: oui or ouais occurs 10 times in GSD, 205 in ParisStories and 300 in Rhapsodie, which is the measure of how much the spoken treebanks consist of interaction.

7. Expressives: thanks, apologies, greetings, congratulations

Expressives are mostly formulaic, and the formulas are part of the grammar of politeness (chapter 32).

These are not syntactically complex, but they are frequent in particular genres, and the treebanks show it. Bravo or félicitations occurs 12 times in GSD, where most of the examples are customer reviews (Bravo à Mme Pierrefixe et toute son équipe. fr-ud-train_12123). Bonjour and merci occur in reviews and in forum posts (Merci pour l'aide que vous apportez. fr-ud-train_00994). In ParisStories, a corpus of told stories, merci occurs 0 times. In a corpus of narratives the speakers do not thank the hearer, and this is a clear case in which the content of a treebank determines which acts it can show.

8. Performatives and declarations

An explicit performative names the act it does: Je promets de venir. Je vous remercie. Je vous ordonne de partir. Je déclare la séance ouverte. The mark of a performative is that it is in the first person of the present indicative and that it can take the adverb hereby (par la présente, par ces mots). French has the formulaic performative present of the law, with the verb in the third person: Le tribunal condamne l'accusé à trois ans de prison. Est nommé directeur … Article 1er. Il est créé …. The law is a large field of performatives: the verbs of the judgment (condamne, déboute, ordonne, constate), of the decree (décrète, arrête, nomme) and of the contract (s'engage, reconnaît, déclare). The only legal treebank we hold is ALTS, which is sixteenth-century legal French from Normandy and Guernsey (trial accounts and a commentary on Norman law), so it shows the judgment formulas of an older state of the language, not modern ones.

Other performatives are the declarations of ceremony (Je vous déclare mari et femme, Je te baptise …), of institutions (La séance est ouverte. La séance est levée.) and the speech acts of the person: Je démissionne. Je te quitte. Je renonce. A sentence in the present of a performative verb is not a description: Je démissionne. said by a minister resigns; said by a child, it does not. The felicity conditions are social, not linguistic, which is a point Mova cannot represent (see below).

A performative can also be used non-literally. Je te dis que oui and Je vous assure que … are assertions with an intensifier. Je te promets que … may be a weak assurance (Je te promets que c'est vrai.). Je vous en prie is a polite formula that can be an invitation (Entrez, je vous en prie), a reply to thanks, or a polite insistence. Such stretches are fixed expressions (chapter 19).

9. Indirect acts

An indirect speech act performs one act by means of another. Searle's account has a primary, non-literal act and a secondary, literal act, and the hearer derives the first from the second by reasoning about the speaker's intentions. French conventionalises many:

The negative question is a French specialty of the request: Vous n'avez pas de monnaie ? and Tu n'aurais pas un stylo ? The negative form and the conditional reduce the force: if the answer is no, the speaker had expected it. The same form, Tu ne viens pas ?, in a different context expresses surprise at the hearer's absence or invites a reconsideration (an invitation to join). Such forms depend on knowledge of conventions, and the responses Si, je viens and Non, je ne viens pas show the polar response particle of section 6.

A question that is rhetorical (Qui pourrait croire cela ?) is a strong assertion in the form of a question. There is no mark on the tree that separates it from a real question; the inference comes from the content and the context. Chapter 34 takes up the rhetorical question as a figure.

10. Reporting speech acts

A report of a speech act chooses a verb that names the act, and the verb selects the structure of the complement. The French verbs of speech act group as follows:

The mood in the dependent clause is a function of the act: a directive (order, request, suggestion) takes the subjunctive when it has its own subject (Je demande qu'il parte, Elle exige qu'il vienne), and an assertion or a promise takes the indicative (chapter 24). Hence a clause with que + subjunctive after a verb of speech is a directive report, one with que + indicative an assertive one: Je lui ai dit qu'il viendra (I said that he will come) versus Je lui ai dit qu'il vienne (I told him to come). This regularity is a usable cue for a system that has the verb and the mood of the complement.

The report of a question changes the order and the pronouns, as in all indirect speech: Elle a demandé où il allait. In direct speech the reporting clause can follow the quote, with the subject inverted: « Venez ici », dit-il. (chapter 7 on the quotation marks and the dash of dialogue). These constructions are marked in the UD trees as parataxis (the reporting clause) and ccomp (the reported one).

11. Counts in the French treebanks

The figures below were made on 2026-11-06 on the UD 2.18 French treebanks (all splits together, per syntactic word, punctuation included).

The imperative. Mood=Imp verbs, by person and number:

The register effect is visible. In the written web texts (GSD, reviews and blogs) the imperative addresses a public and takes vous (93 against 15 for tu); in the stories of ParisStories, told to a friend, it takes tu (26 against 5 for vous); in Rhapsodie, in which speakers are interviewed, it takes vous and nous (the nous imperatives are Dites, Voyons, Disons and the like, discourse structuring). In GSD the lemmas are aller (15, mostly Allez-y), hésiter (11, from N'hésitez pas), rappeler (5) and faire (4): a formula (n'hésitez pas), an encouragement (allez-y), a reminder (rappeler) and faire together make up about a quarter of the imperatives. In ParisStories aller is again first (12 of 31, vas-y), and in Rhapsodie dire (18 of 65, dites, disons). In other words the imperative in these corpora is largely a formula of interaction, and rarely a command.

The conditional. Mood=Cnd finite verbs: GSD 431 (1.1 per 1 000 tokens), ParisStories 47 (1.1), Rhapsodie 89 (2.0), Sequoia 146 (2.1). By lemma, in GSD the third-person forms of avoir (111), être (73), pouvoir (66) and devoir (38) dominate: the written conditional is mostly the conditional of hypothesis and report. The first person is 6.5% of the conditionals in GSD (28 of 431), 28% in ParisStories (13 of 47), 43% in Rhapsodie (38 of 89) and 27% in Sequoia (40 of 146): in speech and in parliamentary speech the conditional is much more often that of wishes and polite requests. The first-person vouloir in the conditional is what carries a request, and there are few: je voudrais occurs 0 times in GSD, 4 in ParisStories, 5 in Rhapsodie and 23 in Sequoia, whose Europarl part is parliamentary speech (je voudrais remercier …).

Stock request and offer forms (counted as strings in the sentence texts; GSD / ParisStories / Rhapsodie / Sequoia):

Two cautions. First, these corpora are not samples of requests: they are reviews and blogs, interviews, told stories and parliamentary speeches. Few directives occur because few are made. The counts say which forms are used in these genres, not how often French speakers make requests with them. Second, je voulais in ParisStories (14) is mostly the plain imperfect of vouloir in narrative (je voulais passer mon bac), not the imperfect of politeness. The imperfect of politeness (je voulais vous demander) requires a second-person addressee and a request, and a count of strings cannot separate it.

A corpus of requests is what a French speech-act classifier would need. The French resources that exist for dialogue acts are of three kinds: the MEDIA corpus of telephone dialogues for tourist information (annotated for semantic concepts; the benchmark is released under non-commercial terms, so it informs only); the transcribed oral corpora ESLO1 and ESLO2, with 300 and 400 hours (Barbedette's source); and the spontaneous-conversation resources of section 12. None gives the requests, offers and refusals of everyday French in an open, speech-act-annotated corpus.

12. Dialogue-act annotation

Dialogue-act annotation assigns each segment of a dialogue a communicative function, often with several dimensions at once (task, feedback, turn management, social obligations). The ISO 24617-2 standard (Bunt et al. 2020) is the reference; Mova's own act set for English follows its dimensions (English chapter 31). For French:

• The SUMM-RE corpus (Hunter et al. 2024, hunter-2024-summ-re-corpus-french-meeting) holds about 95 hours of spontaneous meeting conversations in French, with 25 hours of manually corrected transcripts, intended for summarisation; the discourse-annotated part was segmented into elementary discourse units (Prévot et al. 2025, prevot-2025-segmenting-large-french-meeting-corpus: 20 hours of manually transcribed and annotated conversation and 80 hours of automatically segmented data). It has no speech-act labels but gives the segmentation on which they would be placed.
• The Claire dataset and models (Louradour et al. 2024, louradour-2024-claire-large-language-models-spontaneous) collect French conversation and theatre transcripts for training language models of spoken dialogue.
• The French conversational datasets for virtual patients (Bonzi et al. 2026, bonzi-2026-french-osce-dialogue-dataset-controllable) and for customer assistance (Njifenjou et al. 2025, njifenjou-2025-enabling-trait-based-personality-simulation) are task dialogues with a role structure, in two particular domains.

All of these are resources of the form dialogue plus segmentation, not dialogue plus acts.

How Mova handles it

In English. Mova gives each sentence an act from a closed set, in the dimensions of ISO 24617-2 (prag/src/schema.rs: the act enum; prag/src/feats.rs: the features; prag/src/model.rs: the classifiers). The sentence form comes from the tree, not from the classifier (prag/src/agree.rs, rule P0): a final question mark gives a question, a root verb in the base form with no subject at the start of the sentence an imperative, an exclamation mark an exclamation. An imperative whose act would otherwise be narrate, assert or evaluate is promoted to a request (rule P1). Social obligations (greeting, thanks, apology) and indirect requests with preconditions are handled in the dialogue layer (world/src/talk.rs).

In French, none of this runs. What is true of French on 2026-11-06:

• French is read by the English tree parser after en xpos-fill; on UD French GSD (train → dev, 2026-10-22) the LAS is 87.00 with Mova's tags and 89.78 with gold tags (README). The tree is therefore usable for the cues below, but prag and world have no French labels and no French word lists.
• The mood is lost in the tags. The English tag set has no imperative, conditional or subjunctive, and xpos-fill turns every finite French verb into VBZ, VBP or VBD (chapter 13). The agreer's rule P0 (a base-form verb at the start with no subject is an imperative) fails for French, because a French imperative has the form of the 2nd person present (Venez, Parle), and also because the English tag of the verb is a finite tag. The French rule has to read Mood=Imp from the FEATS of the tree. The information is in the treebank files, but Mova's tagger predicts only the English tags, so on raw French text parsed by Mova there is no mood to read; a French tagger with FEATS is a prerequisite.
• The conditional of politeness is not distinguished from the conditional of hypothesis. The cues that separate them are in the tree: a Mood=Cnd verb whose subject is a first-person clitic (je voudrais, j'aimerais), or a second-person clitic in a question (pourriez-vous), is a request or a wish; a third-person subject in a conditional or concessive context (il aurait, elle pourrait) is hypothesis or hearsay.
• There is no list of French speech-act verbs (promettre, ordonner, demander, conseiller), none of the French performative formulas and none of the stock request forms of section 4. The English reader gets the act of a quoted sentence from the punctuation of the quote and from the verb of saying (prag/src/frames.rs: act_of, Say frames).

What is being built. The French pragmatics layer is being built for the Eel, the worker that improves Mova's trees and pragmatics: on 2026-11-06 its round schedule has a kind prag-fr, a gated native round that measures a candidate French pragmatics state on a pinned dev sample and installs it only on a gain (tools/eel/src/schedule.rs, tools/eel/src/native.rs, on the branch under development; chapter 30, §9.4). The executable that the round runs is still being written: no French act has been labelled and nothing is measured. The sentence form and act are the natural first fields, because the cues of sections 2–4 are in the tree. Above it, the planned language-independent meta-pragmatics would hold the act inventory itself (request, offer, promise, thanks…), with the French layer mapping Pourriez-vous…, Je voudrais…, N'hésitez pas à… and the imperative onto it, as the English layer maps its own forms; no such shared schema is implemented.

What is needed, in order. (1) A French tree-form rule: final ? or PronType=Int or inversion (-ce, -tu, -vous, -t-il as the clitic after the verb) gives a question; root Mood=Imp, or a root infinitive with no subject (the instruction of recipes and notices: Ajouter le sel., Ne pas se pencher au dehors.), gives a directive; final ! with quel/que/comme an exclamation. (2) A closed list of French request formulas (the rungs of section 4), of offers, thanks, apologies and greetings (section 7), in the manner of the English cue table (prag/data/cues.tsv). (3) The reported-speech table of section 10, which fixes the act from the verb and the mood of the complement. (4) An open French dialogue corpus with acts, which does not exist among the resources we hold; a first measurement can be made on a small set of French sentences written for the purpose and labelled by hand, as the English cue table was.

Sources

• Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words; Searle, J. R. 1969. Speech Acts; Searle 1975. Indirect speech acts. Cited as background; not held.
• Brunot, F. 1922. La pensée et la langue. brunot-1922-la-pensee-et-la (public domain).
• Colli, A., Rossini, D., Battistelli, D. 2024. A modal sense classifier for the French modal verb pouvoir. colli-2024-modal-sense-classifier-french-modal (CC BY 4.0).
• Taravella, I. E. et al. 2022. Classification automatique de questions spontanées vs. préparées dans des transcriptions de l'oral. taravella-2022-classification-automatique-de-questions-spontanees (CC BY 4.0).
• Barbedette, A., Eshkol-Taravella, I. 2020. Prédire automatiquement les intentions du locuteur dans des questions issues du discours oral spontané. barbedette-2020-predire-automatiquement-les-intentions-du (CC BY 4.0).
• Müller, C., Plank, B. 2024. IndirectQA. muller-2024-indirectqa-understanding-indirect-answers-implicit (CC BY-NC 4.0: informs only, not quoted).
• Pasquereau, J. 2020. Polar response particles in French as remnants of ellipsis. Glossa 5(1). pasquereau-2020-polar-response-particles-french-as (CC BY 4.0).
• Hunter, J. et al. 2024. SUMM-RE. hunter-2024-summ-re-corpus-french-meeting; Prévot, L. et al. 2025. prevot-2025-segmenting-large-french-meeting-corpus; Louradour, J. et al. 2024. Claire. louradour-2024-claire-large-language-models-spontaneous; Bonzi et al. 2026. bonzi-2026-french-osce-dialogue-dataset-controllable; Njifenjou et al. 2025. njifenjou-2025-enabling-trait-based-personality-simulation (all CC BY 4.0).
• Bunt, H. et al. 2020. The ISO standard for dialogue act annotation, second edition. bunt-2020-iso-standard-dialogue-act-annotation (cited in the English manual).
• UD French GSD, ParisStories, Rhapsodie (CC BY-SA 4.0), ALTS (CC BY-SA 4.0; sixteenth-century legal French, used only in the contrast of chapter 30), Sequoia, FQB (LGPL-LR), UD 2.18; counts of 2026-11-06 (all splits, per syntactic word, punctuation included). Sentences quoted by sent_id.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/31-speech-acts/