2.1 The partial interrogative system in Quebec French

There is not a great variety of studies to know what is precisely going on with Quebec French speakers’ interrogative grammar. Most studies about Quebec French interrogatives have focused on the total interrogative system, since Quebec French is quite special in having kept in a productive way the particle -tu (formerly -ti).

The presence of an interrogative particle in a Romance language (even within the Indo-European family) is unexpected, therefore many studies have proposed distributional facts and theoretical explanations for this specific variant (Fox, Reference Fox1989; Picard, Reference Picard1992; Vecchiato, Reference Vecchiato2000; Elsig, Reference Elsig2009; Morin, Reference Morin2017; Auger and Villeneuve, Reference Auger and Villeneuve2021; among others).

A few recent studies have also looked at the indirect interrogatives system, which also displays a great amount of variation. Blondeau and Ledegen (Reference Blondeau, Ledegen, Bertin, Gadet, Lehmann and Moreno Kerdreux2021) show that in oral French, the in situ variant in subordinate contexts is attested in a variety of francophone areas, including in Quebec French, as early as the 1970s (Blondeau and Ledegen, Reference Blondeau, Ledegen, Bertin, Gadet, Lehmann and Moreno Kerdreux2021: 175).

As for direct partial interrogatives, the studies available are even scarcer. For the various forms possible in today’s Quebec French, I rely mainly on Elsig’s published doctoral thesis (2009), which adopts a variationist approach. Using two corpora of ethnographic and variationist interviews, one recorded in the 1940s and 1950s and one in the 1980s, Elsig described the language-internal and (socially) external factors that influenced the choice of one variant over the other. His results are still the most detailed portrait of the usage of the partial interrogative system in two Quebec French speech communities. His study is used throughout the present article as a point of comparison.

As is found in oral France French today (but contrary to what was found in a beginning of the 20^th century written corpus, see section 3.3), the standard form with inversion of the subject and the verb (QVS word order) is almost absent of Elsig’s two corpora: “As the results show, […]. Inversion does not play any role in wh-questions.” (Elsig, Reference Elsig2009: 53, emphasis added). The majority variant in partial interrogatives in both corpora is the one with a reinforcer of the est-ce que kind, in the qu’est-ce que form (4), of course, but not only (5).

This variant represents more than 70% of all variants in both corpora (Elsig, Reference Elsig2009: 147; 149) and one form or the other of the est-ce que reinforcer is represented with all wh words (Elsig, Reference Elsig2009: 152). The second most used variant is the fronted wh word variant without inversion of the subject and the verb, representing around 15% of all occurrences:

Finally, and this is the most interesting piece of evidence for our purposes, Elsig showed that in Quebec French, just like in France (Coveney, Reference Coveney2002; Coveney, Reference Coveney2011), the in situ variant spread in usage during the 20^th century. The Quebec French results are different from the Coveney’s ones though; in Elsig’s corpora, the in situ variant is not playing a role nearly as important to what it plays in the France French wh interrogative system. In the 1950s corpus (only speakers born before 1900), the in situ variant represents less than 1% (7 occurrences out of 813; Elsig, Reference Elsig2009: 149), and in the 1980s, it represents 7.6% of the total number of occurrences (73 occurrences out of 959; Elsig, Reference Elsig2009: 147), making it the third variant most used. This is the only variant for which Elsig found a significant rate of use difference between his two corpora, which allows him to conclude that this variant is on the rise during the 20^th century.

The predominance of est-ce que variants in the Quebec French partial interrogation system is not surprising – it seems to be a continuation of what was found in 17^th century French, in which the est-ce que variants were very strongly associated to the partial interrogative system, despite not being majority variants at that time (Ayres-Bennett, Reference Ayres-Bennett2004: 54-55), which will be discussed in the next subsection. As for the in situ variant, Elsig’s study gives empirical evidence for its presence in the Quebec French system. I will show however that it might be underrepresented in his corpora compared to other oral corpora examined for the purpose of the present study.

2.2. The evolution of the partial interrogative system and the appearance of in situ

As mentioned in the previous section, in addition to the standard QVS variants, wh-est-ce que variants were found in 17^th century French (Ayres-Bennett, Reference Ayres-Bennett2004: 54), but “[the] wh-interrogatives in the late Middle and Classical French data shows that there was hardly any variation” (Elsig, Reference Elsig2009: 162). Inversion variants (pronominal and complex) were found almost categorically in the corpus of plays and literature (15^th to 17^th centuries) that he examined (N=1309, Elsig, Reference Elsig2009: 159). Mathieu (Reference Mathieu, Martineau, Mougeon, Nadasdi and Tremblay2009) gives an example of in situ from Diderot during the 18^th century, and suggests a spread of the variant at that time, but he does not base his hypothesis on a systematic corpus search.

In contrast, Guryev and Larrivée (Reference Guryev and Larrivée2021) manually searched for the wh in situ variant in the Frantext corpus, in texts dating from 1100 to 1840. They extracted 6750 occurrences of sentence-final interrogative sequences, and out of those, only 32 were analyzed as “true” in situ (see Guryev and Larrivée, Reference Guryev and Larrivée2021: 78–79, for details about the way they sorted the data). It is therefore a very rare structure in written texts. Guryev and Larrivée convincingly argue that the discursive context that contributed to the emergence of the in situ variant is very restricted from the beginning, appearing only in questions referring to already known information (“questions à valeur d’information explicitement ancienne” Guryev and Larrivée, Reference Guryev and Larrivée2021: 78).

Given the diachronic development of the variant, we can therefore expect to find instances of SVQ word order in Quebec French even before it becomes “an option of French grammar” (Guryev and Larrivée, Reference Guryev and Larrivée2021: 78), but it should appear in discursive contexts where a regular wh question could not be uttered.

3.1. Theoretical assumptions and methodology

In this section, I give an extensive summary of what we know about the in situ variant in Canadian French, and what this study brings in terms of empirical evidence. As was mentioned in preceding sections, we know that the in situ variant is present in today’s spoken Quebec French (Barbarie, Reference Barbarie1982; Elsig, Reference Elsig2009), but not to the extent that it is in France French (Adli, Reference Adli, Adli, García García and Kaufmann2015; Guryev, Reference Guryev2017). This section offers details about the state of knowledge about partial interrogatives for three distinct periods:

1. 1) before 1840 (section 3.2);

2. 2) from 1840 to 1970 (section 3.3);

3. 3) from 1970 to today (section 3.4).

The division between the first and second periods corresponds to the rise of metalinguistic documents during the 1840s, and the division between the second and third periods corresponds to the gathering of the first sociolinguistic oral corpora during the 1970s. To get a complete picture, various types of linguistic evidence had to be examined, since the variant under study is both new and associated to informal registers, at least in France (Coveney, Reference Coveney2011: 124). In historical sociolinguistics, “Given that the available data is ‘imperfect’ (i.e., limited, fragmentary, or incomplete), it is imperative to gather as much of it as possible for a given investigation, from all interrelated sources, linguistic and socio-historical – in other words, it is imperative to use all the data!” (Lauersdorf, Reference Lauersdorf, Bubenhofer and Kupietz2018: 111-112). This is why we present in this section the results of our investigation that includes both ‘real’ usage data from written and oral corpora, but also data from metalinguistic documents and commentaries. The adopted approach is global: despite the sociolinguistic angle, the aim of the present study is to get a global picture of the interrogation usage in Quebec French, diachronically. The exact value of each variant as well as specific sociohistorical factors may be overlooked, but we hope to make up for the lack of details by giving an overview that will be as complete as possible in terms of types of sources and timespan (two centuries are covered).

3.2. Before 1840

Historical data for Quebec French before the 19^th century is scarce and varied, and it is not an easy task to distinguish, amongst the documents that are left from the New France period (17^th and 18^th centuries), which writer is Canadian and which is French (but see Martineau, Reference Martineau, Aquino-Weber, Cotelli and Kristol2009). The society in New France at that time was less divided and stratified than France society at the same time; in fact, a good proportion of settlers had a fairly educated and urban background (Choquette, Reference Choquette2001). Most of the traces that we have from the language of the time came from travelers’ notes, remarks, and diaries (Caron-Leclerc, Reference Caron-Leclerc1998), but mostly concern pronunciation and lexicon. There is therefore no systematic study of wh interrogatives for this period, and it remains to be done. For the purpose of this study, I searched four documents for any direct partial interrogatives: three private texts and one grammatical ‘testimony’. ^{Footnote 1} Two texts didn’t contain any interrogatives, and the few that were found in the other two were inversion variants. In fact, very few direct questions are found in letters, memoires and diaries from the period, and as far as our research went, there are no traces of the in situ variant in New France.

3.3. 1840-1970

If the in situ variant followed a similar pathway in Quebec/Canadian French as it did in France French, this period should correspond to the appearance of the variant in various texts, and its spread during the 20^th century. I will show that in Canada, the evidence for the spread of the variant is not as strong as what is found in France (see for instance Rossi-Gensane and al., Reference Rossi-Gensane, Acosta Cordoba, Ursi and Lambert2021 on the spread of the variant in plays). Elsig (Reference Elsig2009) mentions that it did exist, since he found seven occurrences in the corpus that was recorded in 1940-1955 (ethnographic interviews with older rural people). Although it represents less than 1% of all partial interrogatives, it proves that the SVQ word order existed. The first direct written evidence of the existence of the variant in Quebec was found in 1922 in a newspaper language chronicle.

3.3.1. Metalinguistic documents and commentaries

Quebec has a strong tradition of language chronicles and commentaries, ever since the mid 19^th century (Remysen Reference Remysen2012). This has to do with a redefinition of the normative locus as well as a constant quest by French-Canadians for identity definition; stuck between the anglophone population who held the economic and social power and a mère-patrie with whom they had less and less in common, French-Canadian bourgeois, in particular, were trying to find their place (Martineau and Remysen, Reference Martineau, Remysen, Dufter, Grübl and Scharinger2019). The date of 1840 was selected as a somewhat arbitrary cutoff between significant periods because the 1840s saw many descriptive and prescriptive documents published about the French language in Quebec.

3.3.1.1. Metalinguistic documents

It is therefore in this context that we are looking for any traces of the in situ variant mentioned during this period. For this study, 16 metalinguistic documents were selected, ranging from 1841 to 1980. They all have the French language as a topic, and are dictionaries, commentaries, manuals, etc. (Maguire, Reference Maguire1841; Boucher-Belleville, Reference Boucher-Belleville1855; Gingras, Reference Gingras1867; Caron, Reference Caron1880; Dunn, Reference Dunn1880; Manseau, Reference Manseau1881; Clapin, Reference Clapin1894; Dionne, Reference Dionne1909; Goeffrion, Reference Geoffrion1924; Barbeau, Reference Barbeau1939; Massignon, Reference Massignon1962; Turenne, Reference Turenne1962; Barbeau, Reference Barbeau1963; Société du parler français au Canada, 1968 [1930]; Rogers, Reference Rogers1977; Dulong and Bergeron, Reference Dulong and Bergeron1980). We searched manually in all documents for each wh expression, as well as for words such as “interrogation, question, interrogative, etc.”. Every time the wh word or expression was the subject of the entry, or if it was an example of a direct partial interrogative, the occurrence was kept.

Our investigation shows that during the 19^th and 20^th centuries in Quebec, the focus of descriptive and prescriptive documents when it came to nonstandard interrogatives was unequivocally the presence of the complementizer que. Out of the 16 metalinguistic documents that were surveyed, eight mentioned direct partial interrogation. These documents all focus on nonstandard constructions, and the mentions of partial interrogation are no exceptions to this: those mentions were to insist on forms that did not follow the standard wh-verb-subject (QVS) pattern.

All eight of the documents mentioning partial interrogatives focus on one or multiple form(s) of the reinforcer est-ce que. The following example was found in a glossary published in 1930:

This entry is typical of what our investigation found, although some documents also include stylistic comments about various forms – in general, the wh question with reinforcer, excluding qu’est-ce que, is considered informal but typical of oral Quebec French at the time. The in situ variant is not mentioned explicitly, but we found, in a document published in 1939, the following example:

This same example is reproduced in a later book published by the same author:

Barbeau used these examples in the section about “The verb”, and not in the section about interrogatives – he insists on the fact that there is no subject-verb inversion, but does not comment on the fact that the wh word is not fronted. As for the interrogation section in these two books, it only contains examples with the est-ce que reinforcer. We’d like to bring attention to the fact that in 1963 (example 9), Barbeau chose to repeat the subject after the wh element. This yields a nonstandard word order, but unmarked for oral Quebec French. It is not clear what the connection is between subject doubling and SVQ, but it might be the case that Barbeau found it more natural to use in situ with either a non-standard word order, or with a word order most typical of oral Quebec French (Auger Reference Auger1994).

3.3.1.2. Language chronicles (ChroQué)

In addition to metalinguistic (mostly descriptive) documents, in order to get a better idea of the stylistic value of the wh in situ if it appears, a corpus much more prescriptive in nature was surveyed: ChroQué (Verreault, Mercier and Remysen, 1998-2011). This corpus contains 7936 language chronicles published in newspapers from around the province of Quebec between 1865 and 1996 (see https://fdlq.recherche.usherbrooke.ca). Given the extensive size of this corpus, only the wh words où and combien were extracted. These two wh words were selected since Coveney (Reference Coveney2002: 220) mentions that combien favours the in situ variant, and Druetta (Reference Druetta2009) mentions that both où and combien favour the SVQ word order (see also Rossi-Gensane and al., Reference Rossi-Gensane, Acosta Cordoba, Ursi and Lambert2021: 183). This search yielded a total of 169 occurrences, out of which six mentioned the in situ variant; five with combien (in 1922, 1929, 1960, 1967 and 1977) and only one with où (in 1976). Examples (10) and (11) show the two earliest examples: the first one is a prescription from 1922, correcting a variant reinforced with a que only by suggesting a nonverbal variant or an in situ variant, and the second one is a usage in 1929 by the commentator himself.

The most interesting element to retain from these results is that although the aim of these chronicles was to condemn certain usages, none of the six mentions of the in situ variant were part of the condemned constructions. Of course, this investigation is not complete since we only looked at two wh words, but it still shows that despite interrogation being a topic of choice for many language chronicles during the 19^th and 20^th centuries (our search did yield a total of 169 occurrences only with où and combien), the in situ variant is very rarely found, and never condemned as “bad usage”.

3.3.2. Usage study based on written corpora

As for actual usage during this period, I chose to investigate a corpus of correspondence (1893-1939, Tailleur, Reference Tailleur2014-), ^{Footnote 3} from which I extracted all wh words, in all contexts – matrix and embedded, with or without a form of the est-ce que reinforcer. The results were sorted to keep only the direct questions, the results of which are presented in this section.

The Dubuc-Palardy family corpus was chosen because it represents direct evidence from the turn of the 20^th century. The data is written and the five writers are highly educated, but the register is very intimate; members from a single family write to each other while they are away on trips, at school or at work. Previous studies done on a subset of this corpus (Tailleur and Rouillard, Reference Tailleur, Rouillard, Martineau and Remysen2020; Tailleur and Saint-Gelais, Reference Tailleur and Saint-Gelais2018) showed that the results for the expression of the future matched results done on contemporary oral corpora, and that communication strategies typically associated to oral registers such as accommodation can be found in this corpus. This is why, in addition to the fact that it contains 1481 manuscript pages approximating to a total of 139 000 words written by five different writers from two generations, this corpus is a good source of data to examine usage of partial interrogation.

Despite what one might think about such a corpus that is not akin to a conversation, questions are reasonably common in our data. However, all question words are not equally represented, since we find an overwhelming number of comment “how”, given that writers almost systematically ask about “how” their addressee has been, about “how” life is going, etc. The detailed results of our extraction are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Usage data: correspondence by the Dubuc-Palardy family (1890-1935)

This corpus does not present any variation in the use of partial questions. All members of the family used the standard variant with inversion, and the wh element used does not influence the choice of variant.

The only two variants found that did not fit this pattern are presented in (12) and (13) (reproduced without modifications):

Example (12) is clearly an example of fronted wh without inversion, despite the fact that the writer didn’t use a question mark. According to the context it might be a rhetorical question, but it definitely is a question nonetheless. The second example (13) was classified in the table as an in situ variant, but the discourse situation is definitely marked. In fact, Guryev (Reference Guryev2021: 98) considers these kind of examples elliptical wh- constructions, in which the sequence is used to project a subsequent answer or expectation. This example is quite interesting in a letter from the beginning of the 20^th century, in which the “dialogue” is not immediate, and the writer is using a discourse strategy that clearly creates an interaction with the reader of the letter. However, even if we cannot posit that this is a true case of an interrogative in situ, we see that the SVQ order is possible for this writer, but in a very marked discourse situation.

Interestingly, while the descriptive grammars and manuals contemporary to the writings of the Dubuc-Palardy family almost all described the various ways to ask a partial question with reinforcers, as seen in section 3.3.1 above, these variants are completely absent from this written corpus for direct interrogation. It therefore seems that for these (highly educated) French Canadian writers, forming interrogatives with inversion was the only acceptable interrogative form in writing (while Tailleur and Rouillard (Reference Tailleur, Rouillard, Martineau and Remysen2020) show that they all use English words and expressions in their French letters, despite the intimate but highly formal register).

These usage results do not inform us about the possible presence or spread of the in situ variant at the turn of the 20^th century in Quebec French, but the empirical implications of the absence of variation in partial interrogative usage will be briefly addressed in the Discussion section below.

3.4. 1970-today

The previous sections showed that the in situ variant is somewhat attested before the arrival of major sociolinguistic oral corpora, but nothing can be said of its actual importance within the system. For the period post-1970, it was possible to focus solely on usage data, since this is the only period for which major oral corpora exist. This section provides the results of systematic extractions of wh interrogative variants from the spoken French of different regions of the province of Quebec.

Four major corpora were investigated, one recorded during the 1970s in the Estrie region of Quebec (which is about 100 km south-east of Montreal) (Beauchemin, Martel and Théorêt, 1971-1974), two corpora from Montreal (Thibault and Vincent, Reference Thibault and Vincent1984; Vincent, Laforest and Martel (eds), 1995) (these three latter corpora are available fully transcribed through the project Fonds de données linguistiques du Québec, whose main investigator is Wim Remysen [https://fdlq.recherche.usherbrooke.ca]) as well as one corpus recorded in 2012 and 2014 in a working-class neighborhood of Montreal, Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (Corpus FRAN, Martineau et al., 2011-) ^{Footnote 5} . With this 30 years timespan between the two corpora (and Elsig’s (Reference Elsig2009) most recent corpus being in between), I am hoping to find out if the in situ variant 1) is present in the interrogative system of the speakers; and 2) is taking on more importance within the system as we get closer to today’s.

All of these corpora consist of sociolinguistic interviews with speakers of various ages, males and females, and are hundreds of thousands of words in size. The Hochelaga-Maisonneuve corpus also contains one ecological interview (four speakers between the ages of 21 and 23 years old). We extracted all occurrences involving direct interrogatives involving these five wh- words: quand (example 14), comment (example 15, excluding comment ça, which means pourquoi), qui (example 16), où (example 17) and combien (example 18).

We searched by wh word (and not by the interrogative punctuation, since these corpora are oral) and we kept a 30-words context before and after the occurrence. We rejected all nonverbal occurrences and for each occurrence kept, we made sure that an actual answer could be given to eliminate rhetorical questions or préannonces (Coveney, Reference Coveney2011).

For the Estrie corpus of the 1970s (Beauchemin and al., 1971-1974), 127 occurrences of direct questions were found, and the distribution of each variant (in raw numbers) is presented in Table 2.

Table 2. Usage data: oral data Estrie 1971-1974 (Beauchemin, Martel and Théoret 1971-1974)

We can see that the fronted wh without inversion is the majority variant, and that the standard fronted wh with inversion is virtually absent. Despite the fact that the in situ variant (SVQ) only represents 9% of all occurrences (11 out of 127), it is not equally represented through each wh words: combien alone represents 9 out of 11 occurrences of in situ. This corroborates Coveney’s findings (2002: 220) that the wh word combien seems to favour the SVQ word order. The wh words où and comment favour the variant fronted without inversion (QSV), but in variation with fronted with reinforcer. As for quand and qui, the low number of tokens makes them not significant, but they both display variation. This portrait is slightly different from what Elsig found in his 1950s corpus, in which variants with est-ce que were overwhelmingly used, around 70% of the time (Elsig, Reference Elsig2009: 149). However, with a closer look, we notice that the wh word combien, even in Elsig’s corpora, is the only one that does not favour the est-ce que variant: it is used 39% of the time as an SVQ, and only 30% of the time with est-ce que (Elsig, Reference Elsig2009: 157).

For the Montreal corpus recorded a decade later (Thibault and Vincent, Reference Thibault and Vincent1984), the amount of data is more substantial: we extracted 464 occurrences of direct questions, distributed through four variants (Table 3).

Table 3. Usage data: oral data Montréal 1984 (Thibault and Vincent, Reference Thibault and Vincent1984)

Similar to the Estrie corpus, it is the fronted variant without inversion (QSV) that is the overall majority variant, but there is much variation according to the wh word. The word combien favours once again the appearance of the in situ variant, but so does où (to a slightly lesser extent). Quand is found most often used with the reinforcer (QeskSV). Finally, we notice that in this corpus, the in situ variant is used with all wh words, and at an overall rate of more than 20%. If around 1 occurrence of direct question out of five uses the in situ variant, we can no longer consider it a marginal usage (in Estrie a decade earlier, it was only 1 out of 10).

The third corpus consulted is the Montreal 1995 corpus (Corpus Montréal 1995), from which we extracted 166 direct questions of the five wh words under study. The results are presented in Table 4.

Table 4. Usage data: oral data Montréal 1995 (Vincent, Laforest and Martel, 1995)

The portrait is somewhat similar to the Montreal 1984 corpus: the preferred overall variant is the QSV one, but each wh word has a different distribution. Again, the in situ variant is used with all wh words, and it is the preferred variant for où and quand (it is the second most preferred variant for both qui and combien). The overall rate of usage of the in situ is almost exactly the same as the 1984 rate (21 % compared to 22 %), but what is significant is that it is for the first time more used than the variant with reinforcer (which is something that Elsig, Reference Elsig2009 didn’t find in his 1989 corpus; the QeskSV was the majority variant).

Finally, for the last corpus recorded in Montreal (Corpus FRAN, Martineau et al., 2011-), 261 occurrences of direct questions were found, and the distribution of each variant is presented in Table 5.

Table 5. Usage data: oral data Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (Montreal, Corpus FRAN Martineau, Reference Martineau2012; 2014)

The portrait is quite different from what was found 40 years before: the in situ variant is now the second most used variant with an overall use of 42%, not far behind the fronted variant without inversion (46%). The variant with reinforcer lost a lot of importance in this corpus, since it is only used with 17% of all occurrences.