Cover not available

In:Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 30, Frankfurt
Edited by Ingo Feldhausen, Martin Elsig, Imme Kuchenbrandt and Mareike Neuhaus
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15] 2019
► pp. 113–132

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Chapter 6
Historical pragmatics, explicit activation and wh in situ in French

ORCiD logo with link | Normandie Université, Université de Caen Normandie, CRISCO (EA4255)
Published online: 9 October 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.15.06lar
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to further the understanding of the syntax/pragmatics interface with reference to rare grammatical variables. The usage-based assessment of the pragmatic value of wh in situ in French shows that contrary to claims in the literature, the variable does not have a categorical pragmatic value in the contemporary period. It does historically have a categorically discourse-old, explicitly activated status, when it emerges as a new variable representing less than 1% of partial questions. Converging with current studies, an activation condition is proposed: rare emerging grammatical variables representing less than 1% of occurrences in the relevant category enter the grammatical system with an explicit activation value.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research context
  • 3.The contemporary pragmatics of French wh in situ
  • 4.The historical pragmatics of French wh in situ
  • 5.Concluding discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (50)
References
Barbusse, Henri. 1916. Le feu. Paris: Flammarion.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
CFPP. Branca-Rosoff, Sonia, Serge Fleury, Florence Lefeuvre, Matthew Pires. 2012. Discours sur la ville. Présentation du Corpus de Français Parlé Parisien des années 2000 (CFPP2000). [URL]
CFPQ. Corpus de français parlé au Québec. [URL]
ESLO. Enquête Socio-Linguistique à Orléans. [URL]
Fauxbras, César. 2011. La débâcle. Paris: Allia.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Frantext. Base textuelle Frantext. [URL]
Studies
Adli, Aria. 2006. “French wh-in-situ Questions and Syntactic Optionality: Evidence from Three Data Types.” Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 25: 163–203. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baunaz, Lena. 2011. The grammar of French quantification. Heidelberg: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beyssade, Claire. 2007. “La structure de l’information dans les questions : quelques remarques sur la diversité des formes interrogatives en français.” LINX 55: 173–193.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Birner, Bettina. 2011. “Semantic and pragmatic contributions to information status”. Acta lingvistica hafniensia 38: 14–32. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blaxter, Tam, and David Willis. 2019. Pragmatic differentiation of negative markers in the early stages of Jespersen’s cycle in North Germanic. Diachronica 35.4: 451–486.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boeckx, Cedric. 1999. “Decomposing French Questions.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguisitics 6 (1): 69–80.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boucher, Paul. 2010. “Wh-questions in French and English. Mapping Syntax to Information Structure.” In Comparative and contrastive studies of information structure, ed. by Carsten Breul, and Edward Göbbel, 101–137. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chang, Lisa. 1997. Wh-in-Situ Phenomena in French. MA dissertation, University of British Columbia.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen, and Johan Rooryck. 2000. “Licensing wh-in-situ.” Syntax 3: 1–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Coveney, Aidan. 1989. Variability in Interrogation and Negation in Spoken French. PhD dissertation, University of Newcastle upon Tyne.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1995. “The use of the QU-final interrogative structure in spoken French.” Journal of French Language Studies 5: 143–171. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Déprez, Viviane, Kristen Syrett, and Shigeto Kawahara. 2013. “The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions.” Lingua 124 (1): 4–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dryer, Matthew S. 1996. “Focus, Pragmatic Presupposition, and Activated Propositions.” Journal of Pragmatics 26: 475–523. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2013. “Position of Interrogative Phrases in Content Questions.” The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at [URL], Accessed on 2018–07–18.)
Escandell-Vidal, Victoria. 2002. “Echo-syntax and metarepresentations.” Lingua 112 (11): 871–900. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Farmer, Kelly. 2015. Sociopragmatic variation in yes/no and wh- interrogatives in hexagonal French. PhD dissertation, Indiana University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fonseca-Greber, Bonnie. 2007. “The emergence of emphatic ne in conversational Swiss French.” Journal of French Language Studies 17 (3): 249–275. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gianollo, Chiara. 2016. Indefinites
between Latin and Romance. Habilitation thesis, Universität zu Köln.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hansen, Maj-Britt M., and Jacqueline Visconti. 2009. “On the diachrony of “reinforced” negation in French and Italian.” In Grammaticalisation and Pragmatics: Facts, Approaches, Theoretical Issues, ed. by Corinne Rossari, Claudia Ricci, and Adriana Spiridon, 137–171. Bingley: Emerald. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hamlaoui, Fatima. 2011. “On the role of phonology and discourse in Francilian French wh-questions.” Journal of Linguistics 47 (1): 129–162. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hirose, Tomio, and Hiroyuki Nawata. 2016. “On the Quotative “Complementizer” -Tte in Japanese.” Semantics-Syntax Interface 3 (1): 1–29.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kaiser, Georg, and Stefano Quaglia. 2015. “In search of wh-in-situ in Romance: An investigation in detective stories.” In Charting the landscape of linguistics, ed. by Ellen Brandner, Anna Czypionka, Constantin Freitag, and Andreas Trotzke, 92–103. Konstanz: Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kemenade, Ans van. 2011. “Secondary negation and Information Structure organization in the History of English.” In The evolution of negation. Beyond the Jespersen Cycle, ed. by Pierre Larrivée, and Richard Ingham, 77–114. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kunstmann, Pierre. 1990. Le relatif-interrogatif en ancien français. Geneva: Droz.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Larrivée, Pierre. 2012. “Positive Polarity, Negation, Activated Propositions.” Linguistics 50 (4): 869–900. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. “The syntax of pragmatics: The case of presuppositional negatives.” Syntaxe et Sémantique 15: 115–138. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. “The pragmatics of marked configurations: Negative doubling in French.” Journal of Pragmatics 95: 34–49. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lefeuvre, Florence. 2013. Des corpus de référence pour une grammaire du français vernaculaire contemporain. Presentation at the conference Initiative Corpus de référence du français 2, Institut de Linguistique Française, Paris, March 28 2013.
Lin, Don-yi. 2016. “Restrictions on wh-in situ in Kavalan and Amis.” Lingua 169: 42–69. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mathieu, Éric. 2004. “The mapping of form and interpretation: The case of optional WH-movement in French.” Lingua 114: 1090–1132. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2009. “Les questions en français: Micro et macro-variation.” In Le français d’ici: Études linguistiques et sociolinguistiques de la variation, ed. by France Martineau, Raymond Mougeon, Terry Nadasdi, and Mireille Tremblay, 37–66. Toronto: GREF.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meillet, Antoine. 1912. “L’évolution des formes grammaticales.” Scientia 12: 384–400.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Myers, Lindsy Lee. 2007. WH-interrogatives in spoken French: A corpus-based analysis of their form and function. PhD dissertation, University of Texas Austin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Obenauer, Hans-Georg. 1994. Aspect de la syntaxe A-barre – Effets d’intervention et mouvement des quantifieurs. PhD dissertation, Université de Paris VIII.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oushiro, Livia. 2011. “Wh-interrogatives in Brazilian Portuguese: the influence of common ground.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 17 (2): article 17.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pires, Acrisio and Heather Taylor. 2007. “The syntax of Wh-in-situ and common ground.” CLS 43 (2): 201–215.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rosemeyer, Malte. 2019. Actual and apparent change in Brazilian Portuguese wh-interrogatives. Language Variation and Change 31. 1–27.
Schwenter, Scott. 2005. “The pragmatics of negation in Brazilian Portuguese.” Lingua 115: 1427–56. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schwenter, Scott A. and Mary Johnson. 2011. Neg Nada constructions in comparative perspective: Brazilian Portuguese and Argitinian Spanish. Presentation at 12th IPRA, July 3–8 2011, University of Manchester. Powerpoint presentation, 24 slides.
Silvennoinen, Olli O. 2017. Contrastive negation in English: constructions in a register perspective. Presentation at the Conference The Pragmatics of Negation – Aspects of Communication, Stockholm Universitet, May 2017. Powerpoint, 32 slides, University of Helsinki.
Sobin, Nicholas. 2010. “Echo Questions in the Minimalist Program.” Linguistic Inquiry 41 (1): 131–148. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Squartini, Mario. 2017. “Italian non-canonical negations as modal particles: information state, polarity and mirativity.” In Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles: New perspectives, ed. by Chiara Fedriani, and Andrea Sansó, 203–229. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wallage, Phillip. 2013. “Functional differentiation and grammatical competition in the English Jespersen Cycle.” Journal of Historical Syntax 2: 1–25.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zubizarreta, Maria-Luisa. 2002. “Intervention effects in the French wh-in-situ construction: Syntax or Interpretation?” In A Romance perspective on language knowledge and use: Selected papers from the 31st linguistic symposium on romance languages (LSRL), ed. by R. Nunez-Cedeno, Luis Lopez, and Richard Cameron, 359–380. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (11)

Cited by 11 other publications

Luisa, Seguin
2025. The syntax and pragmatics of clause-internal wh-phrases in Valdôtain Patois. Linguistic Variation DOI logo
Guryev, Alexander, Laurie Dekhissi & Caterina Bonan
2024. L’interrogative in situ : aspects formels, pragmatiques et variationnels. Présentation. Journal of French Language Studies 34:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Tailleur, Sandrine
2024. Partial interrogatives in Quebec French: a diachronic look at a spreading variant. Journal of French Language Studies 34:1 ► pp. 17 ff. DOI logo
Celle, Agnès
2023. Surprise questions in English and French. Open Linguistics 9:1 DOI logo
Rosemeyer, Malte
2023. French and Spanishwh-interrogatives with and withoutwh. Journal of French Language Studies 33:2 ► pp. 227 ff. DOI logo
Celle, Agnès & Maud Pélissier
2022. Surprise questions in spoken French. Linguistics Vanguard 8:s2 ► pp. 287 ff. DOI logo
Garassino, Davide
2022. A contrastive perspective on French and Italian wh-in situ questions. Functions of Language 29:1 ► pp. 25 ff. DOI logo
Nguyen, An D. & Geraldine Legendre
2022. The acquisition of wh-questions: Beyond structural economy and input frequency. Language Acquisition 29:1 ► pp. 79 ff. DOI logo
Guryev, Alexander & Pierre Larrivée
2021. Routines discursives comme contextes d’émergence de l’interrogative partielle in situ en diachronie. Langue française N° 212:4 ► pp. 75 ff. DOI logo
Rossi-Gensane, Nathalie, Luisa Fernanda Acosta Córdoba, Biagio Ursi & Margot Lambert
2021. Les structures interrogatives directes partielles fondées sur où dans les dialogues de romans français du XXesiècle. Journal of French Language Studies 31:2 ► pp. 169 ff. DOI logo
Larrivée, Pierre
2020. Sémantique de la grammaire, parcours typologiques et changement historique. Semiotica 2020:234 ► pp. 277 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue