Investigating locality constraints on <i>wh</i> -in situ in French: an experiment

Abstract Most analyses of wh -questions posit the existence of a dependency between the scope position and the theta position of the wh -constituent, both in ex situ questions and in in situ questions, but they disagree on the nature of this dependency and in particular on whether it is the same or different in the two strategies. The aim of this article is to verify how things stand in French, which is a mixed language allowing both in situ and ex situ wh -phrases in normal information seeking questions. We tested with two acceptability judgment tasks and two sentence-picture matching tasks whether in situ questions in French display the same subject advantage that has been widely attested in ex situ A-bar dependencies across languages. We found as expected a subject advantage in French wh -ex situ questions but an object advantage in French wh -in situ questions. We explain this seemingly divergent pattern by a) assuming that the same kind of movement dependency is established in both strategies but b) that its landing site is different and hence interacts differently with the clitic left dislocation structure (CLLD) we introduced in our experimental items. In both strategies, a processing advantage is observed when the wh -dependency and the clitic left dislocation structure (CLLD) dependency are nested, while crossing dependencies result in a cost in both cases.