Abstract
This study analyzes the pragmatics of in-situ wh- and complex bare wh-interrogatives such as ¿de qué? ‘of what?’ in spoken Spanish, developing a typology of their discourse functions. The interpretation of such postposed wh-interrogatives depends on inference processes by the hearer that take as cues both the degree to which the interrogative proposition and the referent of the interrogative pronoun/adverb are cognitively accessible. This relationship follows from the fact that on the basis of the combination of the information states of the interlocutors (i.e. the degree of accessibility of the proposition and the referent of wh) with the information structure of this type of wh-interrogatives, the utterer of the wh-interrogative can predict the pragmatic effect of a given postposed wh-interrogative token in the hearer. I establish a hierarchy of the different discourse functions on the basis of their potential to change the current ‘Question under Discussion’ (QuD). In particular, the analysis demonstrates that postposed wh-interrogatives that realize or imply a challenge to a previous utterance by the addressee of the interrogative have weaker pragmatic conditions than other uses. Consequently, I theorize that these uses are crucial for our understanding of the expansion of the use of in-situ wh-interrogatives in languages such as French and Brazilian Portuguese.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the audiences at the workshop on ‘Common Ground and discourse modeling’ in Düsseldorf, the colloquium of the LLSC department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Romance linguistics colloquia at the Universities of Freiburg and Berlin for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am particularly indebted to Bert Cornillie, Conceição Cunha, Andreas Dufter, Oliver Ehmer, Martin Elsig, Marco García García, Eitan Grossman, Daniel Jacob, Karen Lahousse, Pierre Larrivée, Sílvia Rodriguez Parrinha, Uli Reich, Scott Schwenter and the two anonymous reviewers for their extremely valuable feedback and help. This research was funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) in the context of the research project ‘Variation and change in Spanish and Portuguese partial interrogatives’ (12N1916N).
Transcription conventions GAT 2 (Selting et al. 2009)
| [ ] | overlap and simultaneous talk |
| = | immediate continuation with a new turn or segment (latching) |
| °h/h° | in-/outbreaths of appr. 0.2–0.5 sec. duration |
| °hh/hh° | in-/outbreaths of appr. 0.5–0.8 sec. duration |
| (.) | micro pause, estimated, up to 0.2 sec. duration appr. |
| (0.5) | measured pause of appr. 0.5 sec. duration |
| : | lengthening |
| and_uh | cliticizations within units |
| haha, hehe, hihi | syllabic laughter |
| ((laughs)), ((cries)) | description of vocal activities |
| <<laughing>> | description of voice properties with indication of scope |
| <<:-)>so> | smile voice |
| SYLlable | focus accent |
| sYllable | secondary accent |
| ? | high-rise intonation |
| , | mid-rise intonation |
| – | level-intonation |
| ; | fall-to-mid intonation |
| . | fall-to-low intonation |
| <<h>> | higher pitch register |
| <<f>> | forte, loud |
| <<p>> | piano, soft |
| <<pp>> | pianissimo, very soft |
| <<all>> | allegro, fast |
| <<len>> | lento, slow |
| ( ) | unintelligible passage |
| (xxx), (xxx xxx) | one or two unintelligible syllables |
| (may i) | assumed wording |
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