This project aims to provide an integrated account of in situ indirect questions in Hexagonal French (e.g. J’sais même pas j’suis sensé réviser quoi ‘I don’t even know I’m supposed to study what’) from an intralinguistic and a sociolinguistic perspective.
Contrary to the standard variant (e.g. Je ne sais pas où elle va. ‘I don’t know where she’s going.’), such interrogative constructions exhibit a noncanonical word order where the embedded wh- word occurs in postverbal position. In situ indirect questions constitute a fairly recent development in the language and have been poorly studied thus far. Paradoxically, these constructions, which are typical of the colloquial spoken variety of French youths, happen to be scarcely found in traditional oral corpora (see Lefeuvre & Rossi-Gensane 2017 for review).
As a result of this lack of data, there are currently important empirical gaps that relate to (i) the linguistic description (i.e. frequency, lexical productivity, semantico-pragmatic and morphosyntactic properties), (ii) the diastratic diffusion and, finally, (iii) the mechanisms behind the emergence of this innovative constructional variant. This project will fill these empirical gaps by conducting a corpus study based on data from the social media X/Twitter, where in situ indirect questions occur massively, complemented by two experiments, a sentence-rating and a sentenceproduction experiment combined with priming.