A contrastive perspective on French and Italian <i>wh-in situ</i> questions

Abstract This paper offers a qualitative and quantitative analysis of French Italian wh-in situ questions based on spontaneous spoken data. A pragmatic relying two parameters, propositional activation functions, reveals that the licensing conditions use this structure largely differ in languages. While do not require an activated proposition can introduce discourse-new topic, mostly and, at least analyzed corpus data, topics. An examination context also different influence interactional uses these questions. All all, both condition, which is their ‘anchoring’ to given, or inferable, information linguistic (as typical Italian) predictable situations extralinguistic (such as expected discourse moves social interactions, case for French).