WH-Interrogatives in spoken French are exceptional due both to the diversity of syntactic forms available to express the same propositional content (Coveney 1996) as well as the parameters that influence their use. The causal interrogative adverb pourquoi ‘why’ has a notably deficient paradigm (Korzen 1985), as is seen in its incompatibility with stylistic inversion and in situ structures. In this chapter, all instantiations of pourquoi in a corpus of casual conversations, whether interrogative or not, are first categorized according to discourse function(s) and then mapped to structures. This usage-driven, discourse approach successfully narrows the number of observed forms per function and also further distinguishes them by integrating discourse markers and negation.
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Lambrecht, Knud, and Laura Michaelis. 1998. “Sentence Accent in Information Questions: Default and Projection.”Linguistics and Philosophy 21 (5):477–544. .
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2024. Différences fonctionnelles entre quasi-synonymes : les interrogatives de raison en français. SHS Web of Conferences 191 ► pp. 14001 ff.
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2023. Wh-in-situ in child French: Deictic triggers at the syntax-semantics interface. Journal of French Language Studies 33:3 ► pp. 273 ff.
Palasis, Katerina, Richard Faure & Frédéric Lavigne
2019. Explaining variation inwh-position in child French: A statistical analysis of new seminaturalistic data. Language Acquisition 26:2 ► pp. 210 ff.
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