Règles d’ordre des éléments Non Régis

In the first part of the paper we give an overwiew of a natural syntactic class of constituents defined by means of a specific set of criteria : the “non régis” (NR) (non integrated in the grammatical structure of the utterance). This class, gathers, various kinds of grammatical units of non canonical syntactic status in traditional descriptions : sentence adverbials, appositions, interjections, non canonical subordinate clauses, discourse particles… In the second part of the paper we show that, contrary to current assumptions, these linguistic units are not randomly combined with the core elements of the sentence. They are inserted in the utterance according to specific ordering rules and distributional constraints.

These constraints are studied at two levels : constraints on their possible insertions in grammatical structures (microsyntax), constraints on the positions they can occupy in relation with the “macrosyntactic” nucleus of the utterance (the part of the utterance bearing its illocutionnary force) as defined in Blanche-Benveniste (84, 90).