Our study investigates the effect of French verb lemmata on the preverbal (QV) or postverbal (VQ) positioning of interrogative forms equivalent to English ‘what’ ( que , quoi , and related forms) within a French–Spanish parallel corpus of subtitles. We highlight and illustrate the corpus’s utility for studying less frequent verbs in combination with specific wh -forms. Our findings suggest that less frequent French verbs exhibit weaker associations with QV compared to their more frequent counterparts. A post-hoc study using Spanish translations reveals that French verbs correlated with QV often denote observable actions involving directly accessible Q-referents. We hypothesise that queries concerning ‘situationally accessible’ referents are predominantly utilised for non-standard, evaluative, or challenging questions, which are typically QV in French.
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Fliessbach et al. (2024) studied this question.