Revision as of 01:10, 16 February 2013

interrogative pronoun (3rd person singular inanimate), interrogative determiner / adjective.

Interrogative pronoun

In both English and French, it is considered quite lax to say:

• *You want what?
• Tu veux quoi?

But I am sure that both anglophones and francophones find these phrasings perfectly functional. Nevertheless, normatively it does seem to me that the English proposition is considered "wrong" despite its relative frequence in natural speech. Of course in school we are taught to say:

• What does she want?
   wədə(z/ʊ)
• Qu'est-ce qu'elle veux?
    kesk(ə)

There are two parts to what, the first part -- wh- -- is found in who, how, why, when, etc. and represents an "information gap" (a lack of info), the second -- -at -- is found in that and represents an object at a certain distance from the speaker. This object can also be an object of discourse, and in some cases looks like a grammatical subject (in 1):

• What matters is that we...
• Ce qui importe c'est que nous...
• What's strange is that I didn't get what I wanted.
• Ce qui est bizarre, c'est que je n'ai pas eu ce que je voulais.