La focalisation des conditionnelles

The aim of this article is to identify the different syntactic modes existing in French to focus if-clauses in constructions such as {if-P, Q}, and {Q if-P}. It is not irrelevant to consider that if-clauses may occupy a focus position, seeing that since Haiman (1978), it is generally admitted that “conditionals are topics”. Little attention has been paid in the literature, however, to contexts where if-P has the information status of focus. The present analysis concerns three categories of facts where if-P has a status of focus: if-clauses located within the scope of a negation or a restriction, or in cleft or pseudo-cleft constructions; if-clauses in an embedding context; and lastly, ellipsis of the Q component, as in “Et si on allait au cinéma?” [What if we went to the movies?]. From a syntactic point of view, an if-clause demands a Q component, but from an informational perspective, the reverse holds: an informative constraint makes if-P mandatory. The study demonstrates the existence of if-clauses which have systematically a topic status (so-called “factual” if-clauses) and of if-clauses which have a focus status (some comparative if-clauses, either embedded or with ellipsis of Q).