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On the role of phonology and discourse in Francilian French wh-questions1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

FATIMA HAMLAOUI
FATIMA HAMLAOUI*
Affiliation:
Université Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle – UMR LaCiTO
*
Author's address: Institut de Phonétique et de Linguistique Générales et Appliquées,19 rue des Bernardins, 75005 Paris, France[email protected]
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Abstract

It is argued that in Francilian French, the dialect of French spoken in the Paris metropolitan area, in-situ and fronted wh-questions have the same answerhood conditions but vary with respect to their respective focus-set (Reinhart 2006). The difference between the two types of questions lies in the discourse status of their non-wh portion. Whereas the wh-phrase is never discourse-given, the non-wh portion may or may not be, depending on the discourse context. In Francilian French in-situ wh-questions, the non-wh portion must be discourse-given. As this language exhibits a strong requirement on sentence stress to be kept rightmost it cannot, in contrast with English, assign sentence stress to a fronted wh-phrase when the non-wh portion is discourse-given and needs to be destressed. The only way to simultaneously destress discourse-given items and keep sentence stress rightmost is by aligning the wh-phrase with the right edge of the clause. Whereas in Hungarian prosody triggers movement (Szendrői 2003), in Francilian French, prosody prevents it from occurring. An Optimal Theoretic analysis in the spirit of much recent work on focus and givenness in declaratives (Samek-Lodovici 2005, Féry & Samek-Lodovici 2006) captures this phenomenon.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 129 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

[1]

This paper began its life as a joint project with Eric Mathieu (Hamlaoui & Mathieu 2007). Although it has undergone many changes since our collaboration ended, I would like to express my gratitude to him. I am extremely grateful to two anonymous JL referees as well to the following people for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper: Marie-Hélène Côté, Hamida Demirdache, Caroline Féry, Léa Nash, Georges Rebuschi, Annie Rialland, Laurent Roussarie and Lisa Selkirk. I would like to thank Pascale Pascariello, who kindly allowed me to use her interviews. My thanks also go to Emma Wesolowski, who helped checking and correcting the paper. All the remaining errors are my own.

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