Questions and responses in Spanish monolingual and Spanish–English bilingual conversation

Abstract

Drawing on a corpus of naturally occurring conversation, this study presents a quantitative and qualitative overview of the design of questions and responses (567 sequences in total) in monolingual Spanish conversation and in bilingual Spanish-English conversation. First we describe various features of question design and examine their relationship with action formation (e.g., requests for information vs. requests for confirmation). We then focus on responses to polar questions and show that interjection answers are the default answer type in Spanish, with other formats (i.e., repetitions and various marked interjections, including code-switching) being produced ‘for cause’. While some aspects of turn construction do appear to differ for monolinguals and bilinguals (e.g., the (in)availability of code-switching as an interactional resource), others are shown to not be significantly different between the two groups of speakers (e.g., pro-drop in question construction). Throughout the report, we make reference to studies of several other languages in an attempt to situate Spanish within cross-linguistic research on question-response sequences.