L. discusses the functional status of `canonical' sentences, i.e. those in which all argument positions of the verb are filled with lexical NP's. He argues that this is not the prevalent, or preferred sentence format in spoken French, but that there is a correlation between the occurence of lexical subjects and the discourse status of the clauses in which they occur, and that lexical subjects tend to appear in clauses that represent background portions of the discourse (mostly intransitive clauses of the SV type).