Interrogative licensing with intonation: The case of French wh-­ in situ While the parametric landscape of question formation is well known, motivations for wh-­‐movement or its absence remain largely mysterious. Several authors have explored intonation as a central factor of cross-­‐linguistic diversity. French offers a testing ground for question parametrization as it allows both moved and in situ questions as in (1-­‐2). (1) Quel élément est-­‐ce qu’elle a mis au milieu? ‘Which shape did she place in the middle?’ (2) Elle a mis quel élément au milieu? ‘She placed which shape in the middle?’ Cheng and Rooryck (2000)1 (hereafter, C&R) have claimed that French wh-­‐in-­‐situ questions are licensed by a rising intonation contour that is absent in moved wh-­‐ questions. Without this contour, they claim, such questions are ungrammatical. To date, little to no experimental research has addressed this theoretical claim. Moreover, previous experimental work on French interrogatives (Adli, 2004; Delattre, 1966; Wunderli 1983, 1984) has omitted certain design variables, which would allow for a conclusive analysis of the interaction between syntax and prosody in French. This study seeks to fill this gap. C&R propose that French questions are licensed by an overt Q marker est-­ce que in C0 (as in 1) or by an underspecified intonation root morpheme [Q:], which is spelled out with yes/no rising intonation is specified at LF. C&R claim that est-­ce que spells a strong Q feature that must be checked at PF by overt wh-­‐ movement or by the intonation morpheme in Spec CP. However, when the underspecified intonation morpheme [Q: ] Merges in C0, it checks the strong Q feature at PF and is later specified at LF, either [Q: y/n] by default or [Q: wh] by covert wh-­‐feature movement. Putting all of this together, a wh-­‐in-­‐situ content question lacking est-­ce que is predicted to have a yes/no rising intonation and be specified as [Q: wh], in contrast to moved wh-­‐questions, which are associated with a fully morphologically specified Q feature. We tested this hypothesis empirically. Twelve native French speakers (5F, 7M) were recorded reading 35 target sentences in a randomized order in a sound-­‐attenuated booth. There were seven minimally different syntactic types (see Figure 1) embedded in five distinct discourse contexts. Sentences consisted of words with sonorants wherever possible, and no wh-­‐words were in sentence final position. All 420 target sentences were annotated in Praat and were further examined for naturalness by an independent group of four native French speakers in France and by research assistants examining within-­‐sentence distribution of pitch accenting. Two types of data were then collected for analysis: sentence-­‐final rise/fall, and F0 contour. Two double-­‐blind researchers coded each sentence for rise/fall. Agreement between individual coders was 90%; remaining disagreements were resolved through discussion while listening to the sound files. Results (see Figure 1) demonstrate that while most speakers assigned a rise to the target wh-­in-­‐situ questions, not all did. A Praat script was then run on each annotated sentence to compare the final rise of yes/no questions and wh-­‐
in-­‐situ questions. 40 evenly divided windows were created, beginning with the onset of the question word or corresponding determiner to the end of the sentence. Values were averaged across speakers in both groups (see Figures 2 and 3). For wh-­in-­‐situ content questions, Group 1 exhibited a fall, somewhat elevated from declaratives, while Group 2 exhibited a rise, which was depressed from both yes/no questions and their echo wh-­‐in-­‐
1 Cheng, L., & Rooryk, J. (2000). Licensing wh-­‐in-­‐situ. Syntax, 3, 1-­‐19. situ counterparts, a finding which is unexpected if the morpheme in the in situ questions has yes/no intonation. In addition, moved wh-­‐ questions do not display a uniform pattern. Thus while a rising intonation is likely to be associated with wh-­‐in-­‐situ questions, our findings leave open the question of precisely how syntax and prosody interact in French interrogatives and cross-­‐linguistically. Figure 1: % final rise for seven sentence types with a bimodal distribution for four Figure 2: Intonation
contour of five sentence
types for Group 1
Figure 3: Intonation contour for five sentence types for Group 2