Refining current insights into the wh-in-situ interrogative construction in French : the case of Contemporary Hexagonal French

This paper addresses the debate on the existence of specifically syntactic restrictions on one of a larger set of structures available in Modern French for information-requesting questions with a non-subject wh-phrase: the so-called wh-in-situ interrogative construction, in which the wh-phrase occurs in post-verbal position. From a comprehensive investigation of the applicability of such restrictions that is based on a large number of instances of the wh-in-situ interrogative construction from a specially designed large-scale corpus instantiating the present-day French of Metropolitan France, the paper essentially establishes that, in this variety, a fair number of these restrictions do not hold. Additionally, the paper explores the existence of morphological as well as syntactic restrictions not yet thoroughly explored in the literature and, fundamentally, uncovers that, in the variety looked into, various issues pertaining to the verb (tense, mood, passive voice, verb class, non-finite clausal complements) do not bear on the felicity of the wh-in-situ interrogative construction, while a restriction possibly holds that relates to the specificity of the subject.publishe