Performative infinitives in Spanish and French: contrastive study from a pragmatic and textual perspective

Abstract

This study identifies the ideal pragmatic-textual conditions for the use of performative infinitives in both Spanish and French, based on a corpus consisting of 500 texts that reflect different diatopic, diaphasic and diastratic characteristics in each language, i.e., 1000 texts in total. In order to analyze both corpora, we have created an analytic model comprising five different components that contain the types and textual genres where the infinitives are used, the linguistic elements that systematically precede or follow these infinitives, and their purpose in the text. Therefore, in this research what we have discovered are specific texts, as well as the explicit parts of these texts in which the performative infinitives are more frequently used. Moreover, we have elucidated their pragmatic function.