L'interrogative in situ à la lumière des principes de 'End-Weight' et 'End-Focus'

Following the hypothesis of Coveney (1995) that the informational structure impacts the selection of the French interrogative structure in situ 'Tu fais quoi ?' (SVQ), this study analyses the data from the Swiss SMS Corpus (2009-2015) and assesses the role of the 'End-Weight' and 'End-Focus' principles. In the light of the study by Coveney (1995), we will analyze the impact of the following parameters: (i) length of the Wh- element and (ii) that of the SVC part; parameters of (iii) Subject, (iv) Verb, (v) Complement; and (vi) identity of the Wh- element. Based on the analysis of 217 tokens of SVQ (out of 425 QU), our results confirm, although with some nuances, several tendencies established by Coveney (1995). Moreover, our study reveals that the tendencies observed in the SMS Corpus take a more extreme form and tend to function as morphosyntactic environments with low variability: leading regularly to the use of SVQ, they drastically reduce the chances of appearance of ex situ interrogatives. These trends could be explained by the fact that the use of SVQ in informal French is supplanting today other variants, mainly in those linguistic contexts which initially proved conducive to its rapid spread in the 20th century (Farmer 2015). © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press.