Word order variation in French interrogative structures

Jean-Marc Dewaele | French Department, Birkbeck College University of London

Inter-individual variation in the use of direct interrogative structures (N = 450) is explored in a corpus of spoken native and non-native French. A quantitative analysis of the data reveals that while non-native speakers seem to avoid non-standard structures, they do not use more formal variants systematically. Comparison with data from other native and non-native corpora reveals important differences in the frequency of particular interrogative structures. The choice of interrogative structure seems to be influenced by a number of situational, pragmatic and socio-stylistic variables.

Published online: 01 January 1999
https://doi.org/10.1075/itl.125-126.01dew

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