French partial interrogatives: a microdiachronic corpus study of variation and new perspectives in a refined pragmatics framework

Abstract

In this paper we report and analyse data from the ESLO corpus of oral French, constituted during two time periods (1960–2010), allowing for an in-depth exploration of French partial interrogatives under a refined sociolinguistic perspective. With an original methodology for extracting the data we were able to create several subcorpora based on age of the speakers, interactive context and time period. The combination of all the data and the use of raw frequencies as well as Bayesian modeling shed new light on the variation available to French native speakers as to how they can structure a partial interrogative (position of the interrogative element, verb-subject inversion, “est-ce que” idiom). This variation has evolved throughout the 20th century, and both the social group (age) of the speaker and perceived characteristics of the context of interaction combine in different ways to weigh on what type of partial interrogative people will use.