Activation Levels: A fresh perspective on French wh in-situ
Lena Baunaz, Caterina Bonan
January 2023 

In the last five decades, French wh in-situ has been the center of much work in theoretical linguistics. Nonetheless, scholars still disagree on the distribution of these constructions, and on their interpretation. While whether or not wh in-situ is necessarily presuppositional has been debated for years (Cheng & Rooryck 2000, Baunaz 2011, Shlonsky 2012, a.o.), we believe this might not be the right question to ask. Here, we investigate the ESLO 1-2 corpora of spoken French and provide a fresh understanding of in-situ questions based on the notion of ‘discourse activation’ (Dryer 1996, Larrivée 2019a, Garassino 2022). By demonstrating both the passage from a predominantly ex-situ system to a predominantly in-situ system, and a significant augmentation of non-context-bound in-situ occurrences, we redefine the conditions under which these structures are licenced in Hexagonal French, and how they have evolved from a micro-diachronic perspective (1970s-2010s).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007089 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Submitted to Isogloss: Open Journal of Romance Linguistics
keywords:	wh in-situ, french, wh-interrogatives, interpretation, activation, syntax
Downloaded:	382 times

 

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