Verb influence on French wh-placement: a parallel corpus study

Abstract

Our study investigates the effect of French verb lemmata on the preverbal (QV) or postverbal (VQ) positioning of interrogative forms equivalent to English ‘what’ (que, quoi, and related forms) within a French–Spanish parallel corpus of subtitles. We highlight and illustrate the corpus’s utility for studying less frequent verbs in combination with specific wh-forms. Our findings suggest that less frequent French verbs exhibit weaker associations with QV compared to their more frequent counterparts. A post-hoc study using Spanish translations reveals that French verbs correlated with QV often denote observable actions involving directly accessible Q-referents. We hypothesise that queries concerning ‘situationally accessible’ referents are predominantly utilised for non-standard, evaluative, or challenging questions, which are typically QV in French.