La reformulation syntaxique dans les questions partielles en français

This article addresses the question of wh- questions French and the link betweensyntax and pragmatics in this language. French, contrary to all Germanic and most Romance languages, does not use pitch accent to indicate focus domains, but rather a combination of prosodic phrasing and syntactic reformulation. Following a brief discussion of the historical reasons for this situation, the paper examines data from five corpora of oral and written contemporary French and draws up a list of functional properties for each of the four basic wh-question forms. A formal analysis is provided, based on the relationship between ground and focus in wh-questions, and the theory of wh-doubling developed for Northern Italian dialects by Poletto & Pollock (2004, 2006). In this analysis two distinct operator positions are available in French, as in other Romance languages: a higher, disjunction operator position, and a lower, restriction operator position. French exploits both positions, alternating between syntactic forms depending on how the question fits into the thematic development of the context.