¿Cómo va a ser posible? The situated meanings of periphrastic and synthetic future-inflected wh-interrogatives in Spanish

Malte Rosemeyer and María Sol Sansiñena
Freie Universität Berlin | KU Leuven

We analyze the use and distribution of Spanish synthetic and periphrastic future-inflected wh-interrogatives in a corpus of informal Spanish conversations, within Linell’s (2009) Dialogical Theory of Language. Our corpus analysis reveals that future-inflected interrogatives realize three types of discourse functions: information requests, interactional challenges, and requests for inference, each clearly distinguishable in terms of their distribution at the sentence and discourse level. The results highlight the importance of speaker attitude and, particularly, their expectations regarding the answerability of the request. Use of the synthetic future is common in invitations to inference, in which the hearer is not expected to be able to answer the question, whereas use of the periphrastic future is prototypical in requests for information and interactional challenges, indicating a grammaticalization path towards modal meanings. Our findings underscore the value of corpus-based pragmatic analysis for understanding how grammatical choices reflect interactional meaning-making.

Publication history

Date received: 16 April 2024

Date accepted: 5 December 2025

Table of contents

Spanish possesses two constructions that are usually described as expressing futurity and related meanings: the synthetic future (SF, see (1a)) and the periphrastic future (PF, see (1b)).

Funding

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Freie Universität Berlin.

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Address for correspondence

Malte Rosemeyer

Fachbereich Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften

Institut für Romanische Philologie

Freie Universität Berlin

Habelschwerdter Allee 45

Berlin D-14195

Germany

[email protected]

Biographical notes

Malte Rosemeyer is Professor of Romance Philology/Spanish Sociolinguistics at Freie Universität Berlin. He specializes in Ibero-Romance linguistics, focusing on explaining variation and change in grammatical structure. His work proceeds from the premise that linguistic structures emerge from social interaction and employs quantitative corpus-linguistic and psycholinguistic methods to trace how interaction shapes language over time. He also conducts research in interactional linguistics, particularly on the grammar of spoken Romance languages, and develops quantitative models of interactional patterns.

ORCiD logo with linkhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-5348-561X

María Sol Sansiñena is Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Leuven. Her research lines address not only the semantic and pragmatic aspects of interpretation, but also the analysis of form, meaning, and function, or use of modal/attitudinal and other TAM categories, as well as the expression of perspective. Her research interests include interaction and grammar, indexicality, insubordination and other discourse-level phenomena, and language variation and change.

 
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