What is it about?
Is there a difference between 'Tu vois qui?' and 'Qui tu vois?' ('Who do you see') in child French? The article investigates kindergarten data with 16 children. The position of the interrogative words is statistically examined in relation to age, verb, and grammatical category of the interrogative word. Results show that the verb has a significant effect on the position of the interrogative words. They tend to appear at the end of the question with 'c'est' ('C'est qui Taz?' 'It is who Taz') and at the beginning of the question with other verb forms ('Combien ça coûte?' 'How much does it cost'). Other factors are also discussed in this contribution.
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Why is it important?
The position of the interrogative words in child French is the center of much research, because Colloquial French allows two positions (beginning or end of the question), which is quite rare, and children's questions differ from adults' ones. This article contributes to the understanding of how children choose the position of their interrogative words, by statistically investigating 718 questions by 16 children.
Perspectives
Months of transcribing, coding and analyzing a three-year database from an entire kindergarten class allow this contribution to give an overview of the developmental aspects of questions in preschool children in France. It is complemented with research on adult questions (Faure, R. & Palasis, K., 2021, Exclusivity! Wh-fronting is not optional wh-movement in Colloquial French. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 39(1), 57-95. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-020-09476-w).
Katerina Palasis
Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, BCL, France
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Wh-in-situ in child French: Deictic triggers at the syntax-semantics interface, Journal of French Language Studies, March 2023, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s0959269523000030.
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