On the role of phonology and discourse in Francilian Frenchwh-questions

Abstract

It is argued that in Francilian French, the dialect of French spoken in the Paris metropolitan area, in-situ and frontedwh-questions have the same answerhood conditions but vary with respect to their respective focus-set (Reinhart 2006). The difference between the two types of questions lies in the discourse status of their non-whportion. Whereas thewh-phrase is never discourse-given, the non-whportion may or may not be, depending on the discourse context. In Francilian French in-situwh-questions, the non-whportion must be discourse-given. As this language exhibits a strong requirement on sentence stress to be kept rightmost it cannot, in contrast with English, assign sentence stress to a frontedwh-phrase when the non-whportion is discourse-given and needs to be destressed. The only way to simultaneously destress discourse-given items and keep sentence stress rightmost is by aligning thewh-phrase with the right edge of the clause. Whereas in Hungarian prosody triggers movement (Szendrői 2003), in Francilian French, prosody prevents it from occurring. An Optimal Theoretic analysis in the spirit of much recent work on focus and givenness in declaratives (Samek-Lodovici 2005, Féry & Samek-Lodovici 2006) captures this phenomenon.