ABSTRACT
The French interrogative DPs qui? ‘who’ and que? ‘what,’ and the complementizers qui ‘that’ and que ‘that,’ have often been argued to involve different lexical items in view of the differences in their syntactic distribution and interpretation. The unfortunate result is that interrogative qui and complementizer qui, as well as interrogative que and complementizer que, are thus treated as accidental homonyms, despite their obvious formal identity. In this chapter, I would like to show that the identical form of interrogative and complementizer qui and que reflects identical underlying syntactic structures. Moreover, it will be argued that interrogative and complementizer qui and que do not exist as independent entries in the lexicon. Rather, interrogative qui ‘who’ and que ‘what,’ and complementizer qui ‘that’ are to be viewed as morphologically complex items, a combination of the C° que on the one hand and the pronouns i(l) ‘he/it’ and le ‘him/it’ on the other. The puzzling syntactic differences between interrogative qui?/que? and complementizer qui/que are derived from the interaction of morphological composition, X´ projection, and ‘default’ interpretation.
