Exclusivity! Wh-fronting is not optional wh-movement in Colloquial French

Abstract

This article revisits the long-standing issue of the alternation between wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions in French in the light of diglossia and cross-linguistic data. A careful preliminary examination of the numerous wh-structures in Metropolitan French leads us to focus on Colloquial French, which undoubtedly displays both wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions. Within this dataset, wh-ex-situ questions without the est-ce que ‘is it that’ marker are more permissive than in-situ regarding weak-islandhood and superiority. In a Relativized Minimality framework, we suggest that wh-ex-situ items bear an additional feature, which permits them to bypass these constraints. Colloquial French is thus a wh-in-situ language that allows for wh-ex-situ under specific conditions, like other wh-in-situ languages. Hence we argue against free variation and claim that wh-fronting is not driven by a wh-feature, but by another feature. Exploring the contexts where wh-ex-situ is licensed, we highlight a type of non-exhaustive contrast specific to questions, namely Exclusivity, and provide a formalization. The article therefore also contributes to the larger debate on information structure in questions.