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Re: Question about Questions

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Monday, September 17, 2001, 14:40
En réponse à Michael Poxon <m.poxon@...>:

> I read somewhere in a linguistics book a few years back how the French > a-t-il? construction was observed to be reinterpreted as phonetically > /ti:/ > and syntactically [question particle], which kind of ties in with the > "should've - should of" debate fiercely raging ;-) elsewhere!
I wonder what dialect of French you're talking about. In French, there is indeed a construction which is more and more analysed as a question particle: it's 'est-ce que' (pronounced /Esk/ or /Esk@/) which appears at the beginning of questions or after the interrogative word which always appears at the beginning of sentences: Est-ce qu'il va venir ? /Eskilvav'nir/: is he going to come? Où est-ce qu'il est ? /u.Eski'lE/: where is he? Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Replies

John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Michael Poxon <m.poxon@...>