“De quoi tu parles?”: A diachronic study of sociopragmatic interrogative variation in French films

The French interrogative system, which allows for variation among several distinct syntactic structures, constitutes a domain in which normative prescription and actual usage differ greatly (Elsig, 2009). Although many sociolinguistic studies have examined this variation (e.g., Ashby, 1977; Behnstedt, 1973; Coveney, 1989, 2002; Fox, 1989; Myers, 2007; Quillard, 2000), most can be characterized as synchronic. This study traces and contrasts the increased usage and decreased stigmatization of the nonstandard interrogative variants—whin situ and fronting—with the decline of prescriptive forms—inversion and est-ce que—in French films spanning the 1930s to present day. An analysis of the social variables of sex and social class in a corpus of 20 films reveals that (a) yes/no questions—as opposed to whinterrogation—have not changed over time, showing an overwhelming and constant preference for rising vocal intonation; (b) different interrogatives pattern differently such that certain whwords prefer certain whconstructions; (c) post-1960, there is a robust increase in the rates of fronting and whin situ that directly opposes a sharp decline in inversion; (d) working class usage of nonstandard forms is shown to be relatively stable, whereas usage by middleand high-class speakers has shown an increasing preference for nonstandard forms; finally (e) across decades, men use more nonstandard forms than women; post-1960, women’s and middleand upper-class men’s usage of nonstandard forms appears to be on the rise. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/ vol19/iss2/8 U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 19.2, 2013 “De quoi tu parles?”: A diachronic study of sociopragmatic interrogative variation in French films