Las funciones discursivas de las interrogativas parciales en castellano

Abstract This paper develops a corpus-driven analysis of wh-interrogatives in Castilian Spanish. Combining methods from variationist and interactional linguistics, it is demonstrated that both the distribution of the variants and their discourse functions can be described in terms of the degree of mental accessibility of the interrogative proposition (P) and the referent of the interrogative pronoun/ adverb (X). In contexts in which both P and X have a low degree of accessibility, wh-interrogatives establish a new Question under Discussion; in contexts in which P has a high and X a low degree of accessibility, wh-interrogatives are used to elaborate a current Question under Discussion; in contexts in which both P and X have a high degree of accessibility, wh-interrogatives are used to repeat, clarify or challenge a previous utterance. Given that the wh-interrogative variants differ in their restrictions regarding the accessibility of P and X, they typically also fulfil different discourse functions. The analysis moreover demonstrates that due to these functional differences, the type of response to the interrogatives produced by the listeners differs systematically depending on the wh-interrogative type.