A contrastive perspective on French and Italian wh-in situ questions

Abstract

This paper offers a qualitative and quantitative analysis of French and Italian wh-in situ questions based on spontaneous spoken data. A pragmatic analysis relying on two parameters, propositional activation and pragmatic functions, reveals that the licensing conditions and the use of this structure largely differ in the two languages. While French wh-in situ do not require an activated proposition and can introduce a discourse-new topic, Italian wh-in situ mostly require an activated proposition and, at least in the analyzed corpus data, do not introduce discourse-new topics. An examination of the context also reveals that the different licensing conditions influence the interactional uses of these questions. All in all, both French and Italian wh-in situ require a pragmatic condition, which is their ‘anchoring’ to given, or at least inferable, information in the linguistic context (as is typical of Italian) or to predictable situations in the extralinguistic context (such as expected discourse moves in social interactions, as is the case for French).

French and Spanishwh-interrogatives with and withoutwh

“…Consider the invented example in (8), where the string And you 5 It is important to note that this routinization process is clearly not complete for French, either. Even French in-situ-wh-interrogatives expressing New Topic information requests seldom occur in thetical contexts (Rossi-Gensane and Ursi, 2020;Garassino, 2022). The difference in the degree of conventionalization of French and Spanish in-situ-wh is not categorical.…”

“…is much less restricted in this regard (for French and Spanish, cf. Chang, 1997;Cheng and Rooryck, 2000;Mathieu, 2004;Myers, 2007;Boucher, 2010;Hamlaoui, 2011;Kaiser and Quaglia, 2015;Chernova, 2017;Biezma, 2018;Rosemeyer, 2018b;Larrivée, 2019;Garassino, 2022). In Spanish, the use of in-situ-wh-interrogatives is typically infelicitous in "New Topic information requests" (Rosemeyer, 2018b;, which serve to establish a new topic in a conversation (5a).…”

“…Note that the French equivalent in (5b) seems much more acceptable. Indeed, in a recent corpus-based study, Garassino (2022) showed that French in-situ-whinterrogatives are governed to a lesser degree by the degree of cognitive accessibility of the proposition than Italian in-situ-wh-interrogatives, which behave much more like their Spanish counterparts. This result hints at a historical process by which in-situ-wh-interrogatives have entered into competition with ex-situ wh-interrogatives and gradually left their original functional niche (cf.…”

“…also Larrivée, 2019;Rosemeyer, 2019a;Guryev and Larrivée, 2021 for historical evidence for such a process in French and Brazilian Portuguese). However, even in contemporary informal spoken French in-situwh-interrogatives are still typically used in situations in which their propositions either repeat material from the preceding co-text or can be inferred from a previous proposition (Garassino, 2022). From an interactional perspective, one important correlate of context sensitivity is answerability.…”

“…The choice of this corpus was motivated by several factors. First, the use of in-situ-wh-interrogatives has already been studied in this corpus for French (Garassino, 2022) and Spanish (Rosemeyer, 2018b). The existence of these previous studies allows for a comparative analysis of the two interrogative constructions.…”