| Description |
French is famous for its alternation between wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ-questions. This alternation has received two types of explanation: Either it is considered as free variation (see Adli (2006)), or wh-in-situ are taken to be the marked option (e.g., the non-wh-part of the sentence is strongly presupposed, Boeckx et al. (2001; Déprez et al. (2013; Déprez (2018) for recent approaches to the issue, not confirmed in Shlonsky (2012) and Tual (2016)’s prosodic study).
My claim is that in Colloquial Metropolitan French, one the three Baunaz (2011; Baunaz & Patin (2011; Baunaz (2016)) wh-in-situ patterns is actually the least marked option whereas wh-ex-situ questions are the ones requiring explanation. I argue that the wh- is fronted in these structures to check a contrastive feature. This study hence contributes to the broader debate around the information structure of interrogative clauses and how it compares to declaratives Engdahl (2006).
Bibliographie
Adli, A. 2006. French wh-in-situ questions and syntactic optionality: Evidence from three data types. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 25:163-203.
Baunaz, L. 2011. The grammar of French quantification Dordrecht: Springer.
—. 2016. French "quantifiers" in questions: interface strategies. Acta Linguistica 63:125-68.
Baunaz, L. & C. Patin. 2011. Prosody refers to semantic factors: Evidence from French wh- words. Actes de Interface Discours et Prosodie 2009, ed. by H. Yoo & E. Delais-Roussarie, 96-107.
Boeckx, C., P. Stateva & A. Stepanov. 2001. Optionality, pressupposition, and wh-in situ in French. Romance Syntax, Semantics and L2 Acquisition, ed. by J. Camps & C.R. Wiltshire, 57-72. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Déprez, V. 2018. On en est où ? Intonation, information structure and the Embedding Problem. Paper presented at the GEN-wh2018. January 16-18, 2018, Genève.
Déprez, V., S. Kristen & S. Kawahara. 2013. The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions. Lingua 124: 4-19.
Engdahl, E. 2006. Information packaging in questions. Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 6:93-111.
Shlonsky, U. 2012. Notes on wh in situ in French. Functional Heads. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures vol. 7, ed. by L.e.a. Brugè, 242.52. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tual, L. 2016. The Syntax and Prosody of Interrogatives in French. Aix Summer School on Prosody 2016: Poster.
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