Étude de trois variantes de l'interrogation totale en français

It is traditionally considered that in French the use of interrogatives is made according to their sociolinguistic values. In this paper we discuss an alternative approach in terms of 'interactive potential', a concept defined as the capacity of grammatical structures to facilitate verbal exchanges between interactants. After the analysis of 1659 yes/no interrogative structures found in the Swiss SMS Corpus (Stark, Ueberwasser & Ruef 2009-2015), we argue that it is possible to distinguish two types of structures: (i) 'strong' variants with a 'high interactive potential': their use is better adapted to general needs of interactants in informal communication; (ii) 'weak' variants with a 'low' or 'moderate interactive potential': their use is restricted to specific types of discourse contexts and syntactic constructions. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.