A study of question-answer sequences in French. D. argues for the analysis of a question-answer pair as a unit; she discusses the performative hypothesis and the conversationalist treatment of indirect speech acts, and she advances her own approach; a detailed analysis of markers of illocutionary derivation is presented, dealing with 'oui-non-si' chains, the asymmetry between yes-no positive and negative questions, disjunctive questions, non-alternative interrogative utterances, and the problem of rhetoricity; finally, D. examines the problem of indirect answers, their illocutionary, informational aspects, matters of conversational implicature, etc..