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

• Published in: Natural language and linguistic theory 2021-02, Vol.39 (1), p.57-95
• Main Authors: Faure, Richard, Palasis, Katerina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Colloquial language; Diglossia; French language; Humanities and Social Sciences; Information structure; Linguistics; Natural Language Processing (NLP); Philosophy of Language; Questions; Social Sciences; Syntactic movement; Wh phrases
• ISSN: 0167-806X; 1573-0859
• DOI: 10.1007/s11049-020-09476-w

This article revisits the long-standing issue of the alternation between wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions in French in the light of diglossia and cross-linguistic data. A careful preliminary examination of the numerous wh -structures in Metropolitan French leads us to focus on Colloquial French, which undoubtedly displays both wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions. Within this dataset, wh-ex-situ questions without the est-ce que ‘is it that’ marker are more permissive than in-situ regarding weak-islandhood and superiority. In a Relativized Minimality framework, we suggest that wh-ex-situ items bear an additional feature, which permits them to bypass these constraints. Colloquial French is thus a wh-in-situ language that allows for wh-ex-situ under specific conditions, like other wh-in-situ languages. Hence we argue against free variation and claim that wh -fronting is not driven by a wh -feature, but by another feature. Exploring the contexts where wh-ex-situ is licensed, we highlight a type of non-exhaustive contrast specific to questions, namely Exclusivity, and provide a formalization. The article therefore also contributes to the larger debate on information structure in questions.