Diacronic analysis of subject inversion in french interrogatives

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of inversion in French interrogatives. The study is carried out in a diachronic aspect. The author raises the question whether inversion has a special meaning, which applies to all cases of its use, both in interrogative and non-interrogative contexts. In addition, the paper treats the problem of subject inversion as a distinctive feature of an interrogative sentence. The methodological basis of the research are: contrastive-comparative method, linguistic notice and description method, context, communicative-pragmatic and contrastive analysis of studied facts in synchronic and diachronic aspects. Based on the texts of the 11th–18th centuries, the functioning of the inversion of the pronominal and nominal subject is considered. It is shown that from a very unified system founded on the inversion of the subject, different constructions (complex inversion and interrogative with ‘est-ce que’) have developed, which in a general question replaced the simple inversion of a non-pronominal subject, and in a special question they were fixed as its syntactic-semantic variants. The author concludes that inversion cannot be considered a distinctive feature of the interrogative in modern French, since, on the one hand, the inverted word order can be used in a variety of contexts, in addition to interrogative ones, and on the other hand, the interrogative sentence itself is increasingly closer in structure to the narrative, due to the development of SVO word order. Thus, we can conclude that inversion is a heterogeneous phenomenon, which should be seen as a combination of various phenomena that perform different functions and meet the different needs of speakers of the language.