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Clitics, affixes, and the evolution of the question marker ‘tu’ in Canadian French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2008

Marc Picard
Marc Picard
Affiliation:
366 Sherbrooke O. #7, Montréal, QuébecCanada. H3A 1BL2
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Abstract

Clitics and affixes are known to originate from erstwhile independent words. In French, a question marker has developed in a most peculiar way through the combination of a verb-final consonant and the third person masculine singular pronoun, and has gradually spread to other persons through a singular series of phonological, syntactic and analogical processes. Although this it is now all but moribund in Continental Frenceh, its offshoot tu is alive and well in Canadian French, the construction subject + verb + tu having become the most usual way of formulating yes-no questions in this dialect. Despite the long history of ti\tu, however, its exact grammatical status has yet to be established. Various criteria that have been proposed in recent years to distinguish clitics from affixes would seem to indicate that this morpheme should be properly classified as a suffis.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , September 1991 , pp. 179 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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