“…Massot (2008) catalogues numerous areas of variation, including for example the negation particle ‘ ne ’, which absence in speech is an extremely familiar aspect of colloquial French. Most relevant to the studies presented in this article is the complex system of interrogative forms, which different forms are governed by an intricate web of factors (see Myers, 2007), one of them being formality (Quillard, 2001; Coveney, 2002; Myers, 2007). Indeed, it is typically assumed that, for partial questions that include a wh-word and question only a portion of the proposition, an inverted form (i.e., wh -fronting with subject-verb-inversion) is restricted to StF and is still prevalent, for better or worse, in foreign language textbooks (Etienne and Sax, 2009).…”