Explaining variation in wh-position in child French: A statistical analysis of new seminaturalistic data

ABSTRACT

The two possible positions for wh-words (i.e., in situ or preposed) represent a long-standing area of research in French. The present study reports on statistical analyses of a new seminaturalistic corpus of child L1 French. The distribution of the wh-words is examined in relation to a new verb tripartition: Free be forms, the Fixed be form c’est ‘it is’, and Other Verbs. Results indicate that a discriminating variable is verb form (i.e., Free vs. Fixed), regardless of verb type (i.e., be vs. Other Verbs), and that there is a correlation between the wh-in-situ position and the Fixed be form. The Fixed be form is thus identified as the component that leads to wh-in-situ utterances, in contrast to other languages such as English. Overuse of the Fixed be form in child speech could also account for the predominance of wh-in-situ in child object questions compared to adjunct questions and child wh-questions in general compared to adult questions.

Acknowledgments

We thank Carlos Aguilar for his assistance on the test of conditional independence. This work has also benefited from helpful discussions and feedback from colleagues at BCL as well as audiences at LSRL44 and The Romance Turn VI Conferences.

Notes

¹ We exclude echo questions, which are not information-seeking questions but rather requests for repetition of material that was not perceived or not understood. In the following example, B utters an echo question because either s/he is astonished by A’s assertion or s/he did not hear what A said. His/her aim is not to know where X lives.A: He lives on Mars.B: He lives WHERE? (capitals denote emphasis)

² Dryer (2013) reports that 97.5% of 902 languages studied worldwide display either “initial” (29.3%) or “not initial” (68.2%) interrogative phrases. French and Hausa (a West African language) are examples of “mixed” languages (2.5%).

³ Accepted in spoken French (Gadet 1989; Grevisse 1993; Riegel, Pellat & Rioul 1994), whereas standard French requires clitic-verb inversion (où vit-il ?).

⁴ Marie, Louis, and Augustin’s data are part of the Geneva corpus (Rasetti 2003). Rates are from Hamann (2006). Philippe’s data come from Suppes, Smith & Léveillé’s (1973) corpus. Rates are from Crisma (1992).

⁵ Excluding/including the questions of the type C’est qui NP ? ‘It is who NP?’ The author mentions that these forms could be considered as “fixed forms” and could therefore not be counted as instances of wh-in-situ questions (Crisma 1992:120).

⁶ Authors also address this distinction by using the “adverb” vs. “pronoun” terminology (e.g., Mathieu 1999 mentioned in Section 1.1). We will use these terms when referring to our work. Indeed, the adverb/pronoun distinction is more relevant in our data than the adjunct/argument distinction, since our corpus mostly features sentences like Où il va? ‘Where is he going?’ and C’est qui ‘Who is it?’, where où can be viewed as an argument of the verb despite its adverbial status, and the pronoun qui is not an argument per se since it is not selected for by the presentational c’est ‘it is’.

⁷ Twenty children in first kindergarten year, 2;09–3;10 (corpus from Palasis 2010). Rates for qu’est-ce que/quoi ‘what’: children in-situ: 88.2% vs. adult: 16.6% (Becker & Gotowski 2015).

⁸ The question is abundantly discussed in the literature. Here we build on recent research from Amary-Coudreau (2010, 2014) and Roy (2013). Note that the third-singular pronoun also takes the form c’ ‘it’ when the sentence has a generic interpretation, as in (i):

(i)  La glace,   *(c’) est   bon.

  the ice-cream it  be-prs.3sg good

  ‘Ice-cream is good’.

However, this c’est is free: It is analyzable as ça + est ‘it is’ (ça shows up when the verb is lexical, as in (ii) and (iii)), contrary to c’est in Table 2, which is an unanalyzable, fixed form.

(ii)  La glace,   j’ aime   ça.

  the ice-cream I like-prs.1sg that

  ‘I like ice-cream’.

(iii)  La glace,   ça  me  plaît.

  the ice-cream that to.me appeal-prs.3sg

   ‘I like ice-cream’.

⁹ The first year is available online at http://childes.talkbank.org/access/French/Palasis.html

¹⁰ We thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to this factor in our data.

¹¹ See Footnote 6 on the distinction between adverbs vs. pronouns on the one hand and adjuncts vs. arguments on the other hand.

¹² We thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to the importance of this asymmetry.