French and Spanishwh-interrogatives with and withoutwh

Abstract

AbstractThis article describes the usage of partial interrogatives withoutwhsuch asAnd you went…?in French and Spanish, and analyses the variation between suchin-situ-Ø andin-situ-wh-interrogatives such asAnd you went where?On the basis of an analysis ofin-situ-Ø-interrogatives in a corpus of spoken French and Spanish, these interrogatives are described as a particularly efficient means of realizing an information request. Due to the fact that their use is bound to contexts in which the information request is highly expected by the hearer, they can be produced using a minimal syntactic format and simultaneously ensure that the addressee produces the desired response. In comparison, the use ofin-situ-whis less context-sensitive. The analysis also investigates the possibility of differences between French and Spanish as regards the productivity of these interrogatives. An acceptability study of these interrogatives finds no significant difference in terms of the productivity and acceptability ofin-situ-Ø in French and Spanish, whereasin-situ-whreaches a higher acceptability in French than in Spanish. I interpret these results as evidence for a description ofin-situ-Ø as anad-hocinteractional resource whose use does not depend on conventionalization processes, whereas information-requestingin-situ-whhas become conventional in French.