Overview

Inversion is the traditional term for the process of reversing the normal order of the subject and the verb. QU- movement (sometimes called ‘Wh-movement’ even in discussions of French) is the term which will be used here for movement of expressions such as qui, quand, oú, combien, etc., to the beginning of the sentence in questions and other constructions. Although these two processes are independent of each other, in the sense that one can occur without the other, there are many constructions whose properties can be elucidated in terms of interaction between these processes. For this reason it makes sense to discuss them together.

The main thrust of the discussion in 10.2 is that there are two fundamentally different types of Inversion in French which are distinguished in terms of their structural properties and the types of sentence in which they occur. In 10.3, a closer look is taken at the structural properties of these two types of Inversion and the conditions under which they are used or avoided.

In 10.4, we will look in greater detail at the operation of Inversion and Q-Umovement in questions of various types, paying particular attention to the conditions which govern the use of the interrogative pronouns qui, que and quoi and the syntactic properties of other QU- items (notably quel, pourquoi and combien) which behave in rather different ways from their English counterparts.