International audienceFrench expressions of personal opinion, like “je crois que” (I believe that), “je pense que” (I think that), “je trouve que” (I find that), “je considère que” (I consider that), “j’estime que” (I reckon that) have been studied extensively from different points of view: as parentheticals in a syntactic perspective, as metarepresentational prefixes in a pragmatic and cognitive framework, as evidential markers or as epistemic operators in a logical perspective. We examine in this paper a particular characteristic of these expressions which concerns the restrictions they impose on the choice of the predicates in the that-clause. The aim of this article is to describe and to explain these restrictions and constraints on the interpretation of utterances containing such expressions of personal opinion, in the framework of the Modular Theory of Modality (Gosselin 2010)
