Richard Faure

The Interaction between Presupposition and Focus: Classical Greek Wh-Exclamatives

In this paper, we argue against the claim that exclamatives could be reducible to interrogatives in Classical Greek as sometimes claimed for English. Exclamatives are original in that they denote presupposed propositions and are headed by specific (wh-morpheme h-) and focused wh-items. They necessarily involve degrees. We try to make sense of all these features by showing that the exclamative speech act resides in the meeting of knowledge (presupposition, specificity) and unexpectedness (focus, extended scales) at the semantic/pragmatic/syntax interface.

Explaining variation in wh-position in child French: A statistical analysis of new seminaturalistic data

ABSTRACT The two possible positions for wh-words (i.e., in situ or preposed) represent a long-standing area of research in French. The present study reports on statistical analyses of a new seminaturalistic corpus of child L1 French. The distribution of the wh-words is examined in relation to a new verb tripartition: Free be forms, the Fixed be form c’est ‘it is’, and Other Verbs. Results indicate that a discriminating variable is verb form (i.e., Free vs. Fixed), regardless of verb type (i.e., be vs. Other Verbs), and that there is a correlation between the wh-in-situ position and the Fixed be form. The Fixed be form is thus identified as the component that leads to wh-in-situ utterances, in contrast to other languages such as English. Overuse of the Fixed be form in child speech could also account for the predominance of wh-in-situ in child object questions compared to adjunct questions and child wh-questions in general compared to adult questions.