Questioning Particles: A Cross-Linguistic Approach to Quebec French Polar Interrogatives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the syntactic properties of the polar interrogative particle tu in Quebec French. Its goals are to better understand the role of tu in the grammar of Quebec French and to contribute to the study of interrogative particles in general. Three questions are posed which are intended to serve as a guide through the discussion: (i) whether tu is indeed an interrogative particle (or merely a variant of French complex inversion, its source construction), (ii) whether tu is “adapting” to the grammar of Quebec French or vice versa, and (iii) to what extent interrogative particles “retain” properties from their diachronic source element. Interrogative particles are typically either clause-initial or clause-final (Bencini 2003, Dryer 2005b, among others), and often originate from a negative or a disjunctive morpheme. However, tu is clause-internal and it developed from a subject clitic. Yet, it is argued that tu shares properties with interrogative particles in unrelated languages, which it does not share with its source construction. I claim that tu is indeed an interrogative particle, and I conclude that it is “adapting” to the grammar of Quebec French to some extent, for instance in keeping its postverbal position, but that the grammar of Quebec French is also “adapting” to it to some extent, in that the particle is acquiring interrogative particle properties such as an incompatibility with wh-elements and negation. I propose an analysis which reflects this tension, where tu heads a syncretic projection with both C°- and I°-features. The third question is discussed briefly, though answering it will have to await future work. It is predicted that an interrogative particle will develop within a given grammar only if it can occupy a C°-position in the syntactic tree.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".