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

中文翻译：

---

法语和意大利语 wh-in situ 问题的对比视角

本文基于自发口语数据对法语和意大利语 wh-in situ 问题进行了定性和定量分析。依赖于命题激活和语用功能这两个参数的语用分析表明，许可条件和这种结构的使用在两种语言中有很大不同。法语 wh-in situ 不需要激活命题，可以引入新话题，而意大利语 wh-in situ 大多需要激活命题，至少在分析的语料库数据中，不引入新话题。对上下文的检查还表明，不同的许可条件会影响这些问题的交互使用。总而言之，法语和意大利语的 wh-in situ 都需要一个实用条件，即它们对给定或至少可推断的“锚定”，