Sustantivos e interrogativas encubiertas en español

Abstract

Since Baker (1968) suggested the term concealed question —which, following Autor (forthcoming), we translate as “interrogativa encubierta”— to refer to a DP that complements a verb and can be paraphrased by an indirect question (Preguntó el precio/Preguntó cuál era el precio), one of the most debated issues in the literature on languages other than Spanish has been, beside the concept of concealed question itself, what nouns can appear in this type of constructions. However, this issue has practically gone unnoticed in the descriptive grammar of Spanish. This article aims to deal with the ensuing shortcomings of Spanish grammar as well as to review the proposals that fall outside the context of Hispanic linguistics. Most importantly, on the assumption that concealed questions are predicate complements that are remaining elements of an elliptical specificational copular sentence within an indirect question, it will be shown that the type of noun, though irrelevant for the licensing of this kind of structure, plays an important role in its interpretation.