Tu comprends tu? - Questions of Quebecois
Humanities
Linguistics-- 112, 113, 117
Quebecois French is a vibrant but much stigmatized variety of contemporary French, spoken by less than 10% of the world's Francophone population. It has much in common, historically, with now moribund rural varieties in France and is therefore more or less mutually intelligible with Standard French; however, because of the powerful centralizing and standardizing instincts of the French state, it is much maligned.
This study investigates one aspect of the grammar of Quebecois French: a form of polar question which is prevalent in Quebecois but unavailable to speakers of the standard language. This study investigates three aspects of the construction: syntactic structure, semantic interpretation, and pragmatic usage. The first goal of the study is to use the facts of Quebecois to better understand some important issues in linguistic theory; the second goal is to illustrate that, when we get past linguistic prejudice, marginalized and stigmatized varieties of language are just as theoretically interesting as metropolitan varieties. As Linguists, we explore the languages of the world in search of similarities and differences in hopes of discovering what it is that gives humans the capacity for language. If we study only the socially powerful languages, we risk working with a data sample so small that it cannot be representative of the full and natural capacity of human language. This investigation of syntactic constructions found only in Quebecois takes a step towards understanding not only Quebecois, but potentially other less prestigious dialects of French.
The structure in question is illustrated in (1)
(1) Jean va tu venir à la plage?
Jean go TU come to the beach?
"Will Jean come to the beach?"
The distinctive element in cases such as (1) is the particle ‘tu.’ In examining the formation and use of such questions I found that the particle 'tu' converts a typical declarative sentence into a polar (Yes/No) question. In developing a syntactic analysis of the construction, I hypothesize that there is a distinctive point in the sequence of functional elements which make up a ‘clause’ (often referred to as the ‘extended projection’ of the verb phrase) in which positive or negative polarity is expressed. My hypothesis is that ‘tu’ in (1) occupies that position. This hypothesis immediately lets us understand the observation that this particle cannot co-exist with negation; effectively, they compete for the ‘same slot’ in the extended projection. My semantic and pragmatic analysis accounts for the usage of this construction as a simple polar question, but also as a variety of question that is employed only in familiar settings and often employed in order to force the addressee to answer the question before addressing any other issue in the discourse. The facts of Quebecois French are therefore ultimately revealing about the very important question of how formal syntactic properties of an expression are related to aspects of its pragmatics, the conversational contexts in which it can be appropriately used.
