Resumen de A discriminant analysis of Yes-No questions in Quebec French
In attempting to account for the multiplicity of interrogative forms in French, scholars have found a diverse array of morphological, syntactic, semantic, discourse, pragmatic, stylistic and social factors to have some correlation with one particular form or another. This paper focuses on one question type, the yes-no question, and contributes to the discussion by (1) extending it to a variety of French (Québécois) not previously considered and (2) using discriminant function analysis to study the relationship between not only the forms themselves but also the relationship among the various factors governing a speaker's choice of form; The analysis indicates that question types can be grouped on the basis of a combination of factors functioning in clusters. Some question types would appear to be more strongly related than others, but no form is completely distinct from any other. In addition, comparison of results obtained when the population is divided into two social groups reveals only partial overlap in relevant factors. These results suggest that there is a sociolinguistic variable operating at the syntactic level which subsumes a complex combination of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors themselves subject to variation.
