Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-qr5l4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-04T00:54:26.463Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The use of the QU-final interrogative structure in spoken French*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2008

Aidan Coveney
Aidan Coveney
Affiliation:
Faculty of Languages and European Studies, University of the West of England, Bristol, Bristol Bs16 1QY, England
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The contextual and pragmatic motivations for the use of the QU-final interrogative structure are explored in a substantial corpus of spoken French, employing a variationist methodology. A number of categorical, or invariant, contexts, are identified, and the effect of several variable contextual and pragmatic constraints is examined. QU elements of three or more syllables and copulas are found to strongly favour the use of the QU-final structure, whereas rhetorical questions and monosyllabic QU elements disfavour its use. Certain discourse contexts effectively rule out the QU-final structure, and, except for a few categorical contexts, its use is always optional.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , September 1995 , pp. 143 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Ashby, W. (1977). Interrogative forms in Parisian French. Semasia, 4: 35–52.Google Scholar
Ashby, W. (1988). The syntax, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics of left- and right-dislocations in French. Lingua, 75: 203–229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnes, B. (1985). The Pragmatics of Left Detachment in Spoken Standard French. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Behnstedt, P. (1973). Viens-tu? Est-ce que tu viens? Tu viens? Fortnen und Strukturen des direkten Fragessatzes im Französischen. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Blanche-Benveniste, C. (1988). Eléments pour une analyse du mot quel. In Blanche-Benveniste, C., Chervel, A. and Gross, M. (eds.), Grammaire et histoire de la langue. Hommage ` la m´moire de Jean Stefanini, Aix: Publications de l'Université de Provence, 59–75.Google Scholar
Bolinger, D. (1978). Asking more than one thing at a time. In Hiz, H. (ed.), Questions. Dordrecht: Reidel.Google Scholar
Byrne, L., Churchill, E. and Price, G. (1986). A Comprehensive French Grammar (3rd edn), Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Campion, E. (1984). Left dislocation in Montreal French. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Chancel, J. (1975a) and (1975b). Radioscopie, vols. 1 and 2. Paris: Editions J'ai Lu. 169Google Scholar
Cinque, G. (1980). On extraction from NP in Italian. Journal of Italian Linguistics, 5: 47–99.Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (1984). Russian. In Chisholm, W., Milic, L. and Greppin, J. (eds.), Interrogativity: a Colloquium on the Grammar, Typology and Pragmatics of Questions in Seven Diverse Languages. Benjamins: Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Coveney, A. (1989a). Pragmatic constraints on interrogatives in spoken French. York Papers in Linguistics, 13: 89–99.Google Scholar
Coveney, A. (1989b). Variability in interrogation and negation in spoken French. Ph.D. thesis, University of Newcastle upon Tyne.Google Scholar
Coveney, A. (1990). Variation in interrogatives in spoken French: a preliminary report. In Green, J. and Ayres-Bennett, W. (eds.), Variation and Change in French. Essays Presented to Rebecca Posner on the Occasion of her Sixtieth Birthday. London: Routledge, 116–133.Google Scholar
Deulofeu, J. (1992). Variation syntaxique: recherche d'invariants et étude des attitudes des locuteurs devant la norme. Langages, 108: 66–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fasold, R. (1990). The Sociolinguistics of Language. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Flutre, L.-F. (1955). Le Parler picard de Mesnil-Martinsart (Somme). Geneva: Droz; Lille: Giard.Google Scholar
Foulet, L. (1921). Comment ont évolué les formes de l'interrogation. Romania, 47: 243–348.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox, C. (1989). Syntactic variation and interrogative structures in Québecois. Ph.D. thesis, Indiana University.Google Scholar
Freed, A. (1994). The form and function of questions in informal dyadic conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 21: 621–644.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freeth, M. (ed.) (1972). Conversations with French Fifteen and Sixteen-year-olds (Child Language Survey, vols. I.1, I.2, II, III). York: University of York.Google Scholar
Fromaigeat, E. (1938). Les formes de l'interrogation en français moderne: leuremploi, leurs significations et leur valeur stylistique. Vox Romania, 3: 1–47.Google Scholar
Garcia, E. (1985). Shifting variation. Lingua, 67: 189–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giorgi, A. and Longobardi, G. (1990). The Syntax of Noun Phrases, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Godard, D. (1992). Le programme labovien et la variation syntaxique. Langages, 108: 51–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grevisse, M. (1986). Le Bon Usage (12th edn rev. by André Goosse). Paris and Gembloux: Duculot.Google Scholar
Harmer, L. (1954). The French Language Today. London: Hutchinson.Google Scholar
Huddleston, R. (1984). Introduction to the Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kayne, R. (1972). Subject inversion in French interrogatives. In Casagrande, J. and Saciuk, B. (eds.), Generative Studies in Romance Languages. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 70–126.Google Scholar
Lafontaine, D. and Lardinois, B. (1985). Les questions: quelles structures les enfants de 7 à 12 ans utilisentils? Bulletin de Psychologie, 38: 63–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leech, G. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics, London: Longman.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, C. (1989). Some problems in defining syntactic variables: the case of WH-questions in Montreal French. In Fasold, R. and Schiffrin, D. (eds.), Language Change and Variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 351–366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milroy, L. (1987). Observing and Analysing Natural Language. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Pohl, J. (1965). Observations sur les formes d'interrogation dans la langue parlée et dans la langue écrite non-littéraire. In Actes du Xe Congrés International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes, vol. 2. Paris: Klincksieck, 501–512.Google Scholar
Poplack, S. (1990). Prescription, intuition et usage: le subjonctif français et la variabilité inhérente. Langage et Société, 54: 5–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Romaine, S. (1984). On the problem of syntactic variation and pragmatic meaning in sociolinguistic theory. Folia Linguistica, 18: 409–437.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sankoff, D. (1988). Sociolinguistics and syntactic variation. In Newmeyer, F. (ed.), Linguistics: the Cambridge Survey, vol. 4: Language: the Socio-Cultural Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 140–161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sankoff, G. (1980). The Social Life of Language. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Söll, L. (1982). L'interrogation directe dans un corpus de langage enfantin. In Hausmann, F.-J. (ed.), Etudes de grammaire française descriptive, Heidelberg: Groos, 45–54.Google Scholar
Thompson, S. and Mulac, A. (1991). The discourse conditions for the use of the complementizer that in conversational English. Journal of Pragmatics, 15: 237–251.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, A.Bickerton, D., Coleman, J., Leitch, H., McDowall, W., Mason, I., Mulphin, H., and Wakely, R. (1986). Lyon à la une: manuel de I'animateur, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Language Centre.Google Scholar
Ward, G. (1990). The discourse functions of VP preposing. Language, 66: 742–763.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weber, E. (1993). Varieties of Questions in English Conversation, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weiner, E. J. and Labov, W. (1983). Constraints on the agentless passive. Journal of Linguistics, 19: 29–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar