Word order variation in French interrogative structures

Abstract

Abstract Inter-individual variation in the use of direct interrogative structures (N = 450) is explored in a corpus of spoken native and non-native French. A quantitative analysis of the data reveals that while non-native speakers seem to avoid non-standard structures, they do not use more formal variants systematically. Comparison with data from other native and non-native corpora reveals important differences in the frequency of particular interrogative structures. The choice of interrogative structure seems to be influenced by a number of situational, pragmatic and socio-stylistic variables.