Variation and Change in Spanish and Portuguese partial interrogatives.

Spanish and Portuguese exhibit different ways of asking questions: questions in which the whelement is preposed (“What do you want?”), “cleft” questions (“What is it that you want?”), and “in-situ” questions (“You want what?”). First, we investigate why a particular question type is used more often in a particular conversational situation than in another, a question that has not yet been satisfactorily answered although it is important in order to understand how people successfully communicate with each other. Second, we investigate why in contrast to Spanish speakers, Portuguese speakers use (pseudo-)cleft and in-situ questions more frequently than simple questions, and why this difference has been increasing over time. Using large databases containing both recordings of spoken Modern European and Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish, and historical texts, we collect a representative sample of sentences containing these question types and classify the conversational context. We apply statistical techniques that identify those characteristics of a conversational situation that make speakers choose a particular question type over another, and analyze whether these are the same in the different languages. We then study how speakers’ preferences changed over time in the three languages. The project innovatively applies state of the art statistical methodology in order to answer fundamental questions about human interaction and how it relates to language change.