On the overlapping discourse functions of Spanish ‘cómo que’ and French ‘comment ça’ interrogatives

Abstract

Abstract We present evidence for an overlap in the discourse functions of Spanish cómo que XP ‘how thatcomplementizer’ and French comment ça ∅/XP ‘how thatdemonstrative’ interrogatives. We argue for three shared discourse functions: clarification requests, mirative questions, and expressions of disagreement. We show that these functions are cued by an interplay of morpho-syntactic and contextual factors. At the morpho-syntactic level, whether grammatical person shifts (is indirectly cited) compared to the previous turn and whether additional linguistic material (the ‘remnant’) is present after ‘how that’ were found to be important predictors of discourse function. At the contextual level, whether and how the speaker continues her turn after the interrogative is our most significant predictor. We quantify the degree to which these and other cues allow for a prediction of the discourse functions and find that the resulting model predicts more clarification request uses and fewer mirative and disagreement uses than empirically attested. This indicates that some cues for these two readings are missing from our model. We propose that prosody might be one of them.