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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ 29, Nijmegen
Edited by Janine Berns, Haike Jacobs and Dominique Nouveau
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13] 2018
► pp. 21–40

Givenness and the difference between wh-fronted and wh-in-situ questions in Spanish

| Universität Konstanz
In the last fifteen years, the literature on wh-questions has tried to understand speakers’ intuitions regarding the meaning differences between wh-in-situ (WIQs) and wh-fronted (WFQs) questions. The different proposals agree in that WIQs require givenness, but there is no consensus on what notion of givenness is at stake. In this paper I argue that in Castilian Spanish WIQs presuppose that the WIQ is embedded in a specific discourse: what is given then is the (hierarchical) discourse-structure in which the question is embedded. Spanish illustrates a possibility on the spectrum of variation, imposing very specific discourse-structural conditions to allow WIQs. From a broader theoretical perspective, the proposal made in this paper makes a contribution to the study of presupposition, since I argue that there are conventional linguistic devices that target discourse-structure.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The meaning of wh-in-situ questions
    • 2.1French
    • 2.2Brazilian Portuguese
    • 2.3Interim summary and a look ahead
  • 3.WIQs in Spanish
    • 3.1The discourse distribution of WIQs in Spanish
    • 3.2WIQs as follow-up moves
    • 3.3A brief note on echo-questions
  • 4.Discourse-structure presupposition
  • 5.Looking forward: WIQs in other languages
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.13.03bie
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[no author supplied]
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