French wh in-situ: Where are we and where do we go from here?

Lena Baunaz; Giuliano Bocci; Ur Shlonsky

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.421

French wh in-situ

Where are we and where do we go from here?

Authors

Lena Baunaz Université Côte d’Azur https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4935-6369
Giuliano Bocci https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3800-8249
Ur Shlonsky https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7147-4794

PDF

Abstract

This paper investigates the acceptability of wh in-situ expressions in embedded contexts in French. We report on two experiments that tested the acceptability of wh in-situ and ex-situ in embedded clauses of biclausal direct wh-questions and in indirect questions, and how their acceptability is modulated by the presence of the negation in the embedded clause. In Experiment 1, the contexts favored a D-linked interpretation of the wh-element (in the sense of Pesetsky 1987), while the contexts in Experiment 2 disfavored it. Our results show that the in-situ strategy is generally more acceptable (or at least equally acceptable) than the ex-situ strategy in direct questions with long construal, regardless of D-linking and negation. By contrast, the in-situ strategy is significantly less acceptable than the ex-situ one in indirect questions, regardless of D-linking and negation. Our findings indicate that in long construal direct wh-questions, negation fails to selectively block wh in-situ. In this respect, French differs from many other languages (see e.g., Beck & Kim 1997, a.o.). We show that D-linking is not a necessary condition for in-situ in French. We discuss how our findings relate to the current debate between alternative formal analyses of wh in-situ in French.

Keywords

French, wh in-situ, intervention, experimental syntax, D-linking

References

Adli, Aria. 2006. French whin-situ Questions and Syntactic Optionality: Evidence from three data types. In Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 25: 2. 163- 203. https://doi.org/10.1515/ZFS.2006.007

Adli, Aria. 2015. What you like is not what you do: Acceptability and frequency in syntactic variation. In A. Adli, M. García & G. Kaufmann (eds). Variation in language: System- and Usage-based Approaches. 173-200. Berlin/Boston: Walter De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110346855-008

Baunaz, Lena. 2005. The syntax and semantics of wh in-situ and existentials: the case of French. Leiden Working Papers in Linguistics 2/2: 1–27.

Baunaz, Lena. 2011. The Grammar of French Quantification, Dordrecht, Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0621-7

Baunaz, Lena. 2016. Wh-phrases in-situ: interface strategies. Acta Linguistica 63 (2): 125-168. https://doi.org/10.1556/064.2016.63.2.1

Baunaz, Lena & Cédric Patin. 2011. Prosody refers to semantic factors: evidence from French wh-words. In H.-Y. Yoo & E. Delais-Roussarie (eds), Actes d’Interface Discours & Prosodie, 93–107. http://makino.linguist.jussieu.fr/idp09/actes_en.html

Baunaz, Lena & Cédric Patin. 2012. Quand la prosodie et la sémantique vont de pair, le cas des mots-qu en français. In L. de Saussure & A. Rihs (eds). Etudes de sémantique et pragmatique françaises. 357-378. Berne: Lang.

Baunaz, Lena & Caterina Bonan. 2023. Activation levels: A fresh perspective on French wh in-situ. Isogloss 9(1): 1-43.

Bates, Douglas, Mächler, Martin, Bolker, Ben & Steve Walker. 2015. Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01

Beck, Sigrid & Shin-Sook Kim. 1997. On wh and Operator Scope in Korean. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 6/4: 339-384. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008280026102

Beyssade, Claire. 2006. La structure de l’information dans les questions : quelques remarques sur la diversité des formes interrogatives en français. Linx (55). 173–193. https://doi.org/10.4000/linx.470.

Bobaljik, Jonathan D. & Susi Wurmbrand. 2015. Questions with Declarative Syntax tell us what about selection? In Á. J. Gallego & D. Ott (eds), 50 Years Later: Reflections on Chomsky’s Aspects. MITWPL.

Boeckx, Cédric. 1999. Decomposing French questions. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 6/1: 69–80 .

Boeckx, Cédric. 2003. French Whin-situ Interrogatives as (C)overt Clefts, ms. Harvard University.

Bonan, Caterina. 2019. On clause-internally moved wh phrases: Wh-to-foc, nominative clitics, and the theory of Northern Italian wh in-situ. Ph.D. Thesis, Université de Genève.

Bonan, Caterina. 2021. Romance interrogative syntax. Formal and typological dimensions of variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.266

Bošković, Željko. 1998. LF movement and the Minimalist Program. In N. T. Pius & K. Kusumoto (eds), Proceedings of NELS 28. 43–57. Amherst, MA, GLSA.

Bošković, Željko. 2000. Sometimes in [Spec, CP], sometimes in-situ. In R. Martin, D. Michaels & J. Uriagereka (eds), Step by Step. Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik. 53–88. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Bošković, Željko. 2015. Wh movement. In A. Fábregas, J. Mateu i Martí & M, T. Putnam (eds), Contemporary linguistic parameters. 251–280. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Boucher, Paul. 2010. Wh-questions in French and English. Mapping syntax to information structure. In C. Breul & E. Göbbel (eds), Comparative and contrastive studies of information structure, 101–137. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.165.05bou

Chang, Lisa. 1997. Wh-in-situ phenomena in French, MA thesis, University of British Columbia.

Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen & Johan Rooryck. 2000. Licensing wh-in-situ. Syntax 3/1, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9612.00022

Chesi, Cristiano, Veronica Bressan & Adriana Belletti. 2023. The Role of D-Linking and Lexical Restriction in Locality Violations. Quaderni di Linguistica e Studi Orientali 9. 29–43.

Coveney, Aidan. 1989. Pragmatic constraints on interrogatives in spoken French. York Papers in Linguistics 13: 89–99. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959269500002738

Coveney, Aidan. 1995. The use of the QU-final interrogative structure in spoken French. Journal of French Language Studies 5: 143-171. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959269500002738

Coveney, Aidan. 1996. Variability in Spoken French: interrogation and negation. Bristol: Intellect Books.

Delaveau, Annie, Cappeau, Paul, & Anne Dagnac. 2021. Les phrases interrogatives. In A. Abeillé & D. Godard (eds), La Grande Grammaire du Français, volume 2, 1402–1437. Actes Sud/Imprimeries nationales Éditions, Arles.

Déprez, Viviane, Syrett, Kristen & Shigeto Kawahara. 2013. The interaction of syntax, proso- dy, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions. Lingua 124 (1): 4–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2012.03.002

Donkers, Jantien, Hoeks, John C. J. & Laurie A. Stowe. 2013. D-linking or set-restriction? Processing Which -questions in Dutch. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28(1-2), 9–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2012.03.002

Dryer, Matthew S. 1996. Focus, Pragmatic Presupposition, and Activated Propositions. Journal of Pragmatics 26: 475–523. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(95)00059-3

Enç , Mürvet. 1991. The semantics of specificity. Linguistic Inquiry 22:1–25.

Etxepare, Ricardo & Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria. 2005. In-situ wh-phrases in Spanish: locality and quantification. Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes 33, 9–34. https://doi.org/10.4000/rlv.1238

Faure, Richard & Katerina Palasis. 2021. Exclusivity! Wh-fronting is not optional wh-movement in Colloquial French. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 39, 57–95. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-020-09476-w

Frazier, Lyn & Charles Clifton. 2002. Processing “d-linked” phrases. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 31(6), 633–659.https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021269122049

Gardner-Chloros, Penelope & Maria Secova. 2018. Grammatical change in Paris French: In-situ question words in embedded contexts. Journal of French Language Studies 28(2) pp. 181–207. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959269518000091

Glasbergen-Plas, Aliza. 2021. Questions in context: the case of French wh-in-situ. Amsterdam: LOT.

Guryev, Alexander. 2017. La forme des interrogatives dans le Corpus suisse de SMS en français. Étude multidimensionnelle. Ph.D. Thesis. Université de Neuchâtel and Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Hamlaoui, Fatima. 2009. La focalisation à l’interface de la syntaxe et de la phonologie: le cas du français dans une perspective typologique. Ph.D. Thesis, Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Hamlaoui, Fatima. 2011. On the role of phonology and discourse in Francilian French wh-questions. Journal of Linguistics 47: 129–162.

Huková, Lubomíra. 2006. La variation syntaxique des interrogatives directes en français parlé. Master Thesis, Universizita Karolva v Praze.

Kaiser, Georg & Stefano Quaglia. 2015. In search of wh-in-situ in Romance: An investigation in detective stories. In E. Brandner, A. Czypionka, C. Freitag & A. Trotzke (eds), Charting the landscape of linguistics, 92–103. Konstanz: Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System. https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/handle/123456789/34161

Koopman, Hilda. 1983. ECP effects in main clauses. Linguistic Inquiry 14(2). 346–350.

Larrivée, Pierre. 2019. Historical pragmatics, explicit activation and wh in-situ in French. In I. Feldhausen, M. Elsig, I. Kuchenbrandt & M. Neuhaus (eds), Romance languages and linguistic theory 15. Selected papers from ‘Going Romance 30’, Frankfurt, 114–132. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.15.06lar

Ledegen, Gudrun. 2016. Traits syntaxiques “populaires” dans le français “régional” de la Réunion: très populaires dans la francophonie, jusqu’en Nouvelle Calédonie. Langages 203: 87–102.DOI : 10.3917/lang.203.0087.

Ledegen, Gudrun & Philippe Martin 2020. L’interrogative indirect in-situ dans le corpus OFROM “ Ils posaient la questions c’était quoi ?”. Studia linguistica romanica 4: 175-194. https://doi.org/10.25364/19.2020.4.9

Lenth, Russel V. 2023. emmeans: Estimated Marginal Means, aka Least-Squares Means (Version 1.8.5). https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=emmeans

Marchessou, Agnès 2018. Strasbourg, another setting for sociolinguistic variation in contemporary French. Journal of French Language Studies 28: 265-289. doi:10.1017/S095926951800008X

Mathieu, Eric. 1999. WH in-situ and the intervention effect. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 11: 441–472.

Mathieu, Eric. 2002. The syntax of non-canonical quantification: a comparative study. Ph.D. Thesis, University College London.

Mathieu, Eric. 2004. The mapping of form and interpretation: the case of optional WH-movement in French. Lingua 114: 1090–1132. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2003.07.002

Mathieu, Eric. 2009. Les questions en français: micro- et macro-variation. In F. Martineau, R. Mougeon, T. Nadasdi & M. Tremblay (eds), Le français d’ici: études linguistiques et sociolinguistiques sur la variation du français au Québec et en Ontario, 37–66. Toronto : GREF.

Obenauer, Hans-Georg. 1994. Aspect de la syntaxe A-barre – Effets d’intervention et mouvement des quantifieurs. Ph.D. Thesis, Université de Paris VIII.

Oiry, Magda. 2011. A case of true optionality: Wh in-situ patterns like long movement in French. Linguistic Analysis 37(1–2) : 115–142.

Pires, Acrisio & Heather Lee Taylor. 2009. The syntax of wh-in-situ and common ground. In: M. Elliott, J. Kirby, O. Sawada, E. Staraki & S. Yoon (eds), CLS 43: The Panels 2007. Proceedings from the Panels of the Forty-third Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Vol. 43-2. 201–215. Chicago: The Chicago Linguistic Society.

Pesetsky, David. 1987. Wh-in-situ: movement and unselective binding. In E. Reuland & A. ter Meulen (eds), The Representation of Indefiniteness. 98-129. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Plunkett, Bernadette. 2000. What’s what in French questions. Journal of Linguistics 36(03). 511–530.

R Core Team. 2024. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/.

Rizzi, Luigi. 2004. Locality and Left Periphery. In A. Belletti (ed), Structures and Beyond. 223–251. New York NY: OUP.

Rizzi, Luigi. 2006. On the form of chains: Criterial positions and ECP effects. In L. L.-S. Cheng & N. Corver (eds), Wh-movement: Moving on, 97–134. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Shlonsky, Ur. 2012. Notes on wh in situ in French. In L. Brugé, A. Cardinaletti, G. Giusti, N. Munaro, C. Poletto (eds), Functional Heads. 242–252. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Singmann, Henrik, Bolker, Ben, Westfall, Jake & Frederik Aust. 2016. afex: Analysis of Factorial Experiments. R package. Retrieved from https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=afex

Starke, Michal. 2001. Move dissolves into merge: a theory of locality. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Geneva.

Thiberge, Gabriel. 2020. Acquisition et maîtrise des interrogatives partielles en français: La variation comme outil interactionnel, Ph.D Thesis, Université de Paris-Cité.

Thiberge, Gabriel, Badin, Flora, & Loïc Liégeois. 2021. French partial interrogatives: a microdiachronic corpus study of variation and new perspectives in a refined pragmatics framework. Faits de Langues 51(2), 179-202. https://doi.org/10.1163/19589514-05102010

Tieu, Lyn. 2012. Semantic-pragmatic conditions on wh-in-situ in English. Poster presented at the 86th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Portland.

Tual, Lucas. 2017. Long-distance wh-in-situ in French: an experimental study. Presentation presented at the Romance Interrogatives, Konstanz.

Schwarz, Florian & Jeremy Zehr. 2021. Tutorial: Introduction to PCIbex – An Open-Science Platform for Online Experiments: Design, Data-Collection and Code-Sharing. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 43(43). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1ng1q4c6. (24 March, 2022).

Zimmermann, Michael & Katharina Kaiser. 2019. Refining current insights into the wh-in-situ interrogative construction in French: the case of Contemporary Hexagonal French. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 70 (1): 123-157. https://doi.org/10.1515/roja-2019-0005

Zubizarreta, María Luisa. 2003. Intervention effects in the French wh-in-situ construction. Syntax or interpretation? In R. Núñez-Cedeño, L. López, R. Cameron (eds), A Romance Perspective on Language Knowledge and Use. Selected Papers from the 31th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Chicago, 19–22 April 2001. 359–379. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.238.26zub