A relative verb for Spoken French: The missing link

Abstract

The morphosyntactic status of the French ‘subject clitics’ has long generated controversy within many schools of linguistics. Absent from this discussion, however, has been the status of the interrogative/relative pronoun qui, ‘who.’ When the tokens of qui in a corpus of French conversation are subjected to a series of tests designed to assess the degree to which it is analytic or synthetic (Schwegler, 1990; see also Zwicky and Pullum, 1983), the results suggest that we have missed a key member of the paradigm. Not only have the ‘subject clitics’ become affixes, creating a prefixally inflected verb paradigm and ensuing pro-drop typology through subject cycle renewal, but the interrogative/relative pronoun qui seems to be following suite. It seems to have split into a free interrogative pronoun, Qui? ‘Who?,’ and a bound morpheme, i.e., an inflectional prefix, 3REL-V, that occurs on the finite verb in subject relative clauses, e.g., cleft constructions, where it distinguishes discourse-new from discourse-accessible information found in main clauses and bearing a different inflectional prefix, il-V. These findings have important implications for our understanding of how grammar, discourse, and prescriptive factors intersect, as learners reanalyze the input in abductively innovative ways influencing the course of language change (Andersen, 1973).