Exclusivity! Wh-fronting is not optional wh-movement in Colloquial French

Faure, Richard; Palasis, Katerina

doi:10.1007/s11049-020-09476-w

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 82 publications

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“…Type 3 is presuppositional-specific (the wh-phrase forms its own prosodic phrase; Vergnaud and Zubizarreta, 2005). 8 In adult speech, Faure and Palasis (2021) showed that wh-ex-situ is favoured by the presence of a contrastive feature whose specific semantics is exclusive, meaning that the question conveys the presupposition that at least one of the contextually available answers is a priori excluded.…”

Section: Outliers To the Correlation Between Fixed Be Form And Wh-in-...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Wh-in-situ in child French: Deictic triggers at the syntax-semantics interface

2023

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This article investigates the development of wh-in-situ questions in French by examining a three-year kindergarten dataset of spontaneous productions with 16 children between 2;5 and 5;11. The distribution of the wh-phrases is statistically examined in relation to age, verb form (Fixed be form c’est ‘it is’ vs. Free be forms vs. Free lexical verbs), and grammatical category of the wh-word (Pronoun vs. Adverb). Results show that wh-in-situ remains prevalent throughout the period despite a steady increase in wh-ex-situ. Verb form (Fixed vs. All free forms) is a discriminating variable for the wh-position in all three years, and it interacts with the category of the wh-word. The Fixed be form c’est favours in-situ wh-pronouns (c’est qui Taz ?), whereas the Free forms favour wh-ex-situ questions, and massively co-occur with wh-adverbs (combien ça coûte ?). The emergence of the ex-situ qu’est-ce que ‘what is it that’, as opposed to the in-situ quoi ‘what’, is identified as a factor accounting for the gradual increase in wh-ex-situ. Finally, most outliers (wh-in-situ with Free forms) are shown to belong to the same paradigm as c’est in-situ questions: non-presuppositional questions, which are visible from the frequent use of là ‘there’, like c’est, a deictic item.

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Section: Outliers To the Correlation Between Fixed Be Form And Wh-in-...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Wh-in-situ in child French: Deictic triggers at the syntax-semantics interface

2023

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“…This structure is frequently used in spoken colloquial French (Coveney, 2011;Faure and Palasis, 2021;Hamlaoui, 2011;Koch and Oesterreicher, 2011, a.o.). As wh-in-situ questions contain a question word, they are morphosyntactically marked as interrogative sentences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pragmatic effects on the sentence-final intonation of answered wh-in-situ questions in French

Reinhardt,

Matuschat-Petersen

2024

J. Fr. Lang. Stud.

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The final intonation in French wh-in-situ questions is subject to much debate. Although a wide variety of final pitch movements has been observed, recent studies generally agree on a tendency for final rises. In our study, we analysed the answered wh-in-situ questions (e.g. Tu veux savoir quoi ? – Tout ! ‘What do you want to know? – Everything!’) in a corpus of eleven audio books. For our analysis, we used perceptual classifications by three annotators. Annotations included not only the perception of final intonational movement (‘rise’/‘fall’/‘plateau’), but also string-related (wh-lexeme; ‘wh-word final’/‘wh-word non-final’) and pragmatic (‘information-seeking’/‘non-information-seeking’; ‘hierarchical’/‘non-hierarchical’) features. Our results show that a) even string-identical wh-in-situ questions can be pronounced with rises as well as falls and b) pragmatics affect the final pitch movement. If the speaker is hierarchically superior to the hearer, rises are less likely, and questions that are answered by the same speaker are even associated with a non-rising default. However, our data also suggest that pragmatic functions cannot be directly mapped to pitch movement. Information-seeking questions can be pronounced with all three final intonations and speakers may even choose opposite patterns for the same interrogative in the same context.

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“…The French interrogative system remains a topic of interest in research on both first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisitions of French (Faure and Palasis 2021;Hamlaoui 2011;Li 2021;Zwanziger 2008). Its complexity is widely recognized and has been identified as a potential challenge for L2 learners (Donaldson 2016;Zwanziger 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The L2 Acquisition of French Interrogatives: Pragmatic Inferences in Clefted wh-Questions

Destruel

Donaldson

2021

Languages

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The present study aims to elaborate on the understanding of the second language (L2) acquisition of French interrogatives by focusing on clefted (subject) wh-questions, structures that are largely absent in prior L2 literature. Our research question addresses how L2 learners of French understand two specific properties associated with these interrogatives: existence and exhaustivity. Using two rating tasks, we examined whether a total of 48 L2 learners converge towards the native norm for these properties, which occur at the syntax-discourse interface and may therefore be vulnerable to incomplete acquisition, following the Interface Hypothesis. Our findings suggest that L2 learners at the intermediate level acquire an understanding of the existential inference before an understanding of exhaustivity.

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Exclusivity! Wh-fronting is not optional wh-movement in Colloquial French

Cited by 5 publications

References 82 publications

Wh-in-situ in child French: Deictic triggers at the syntax-semantics interface

Wh-in-situ in child French: Deictic triggers at the syntax-semantics interface

Pragmatic effects on the sentence-final intonation of answered wh-in-situ questions in French

The L2 Acquisition of French Interrogatives: Pragmatic Inferences in Clefted wh-Questions

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