Agenda

The complex interrogative pronoun el qué ‘what’, which alternates with the neutral interrogative qué ‘what’ in certain contexts, is used in all varieties of Spanish. The form lo qué occurs in the Spanish of Spain, Argentina and Uruguay. The aim of this talk is to describe the interpretative and distributional properties of these complex interrogatives, with special attention to the type of questions in which they appear, and to propose an analysis of their internal structure to explain the combination of the article el ‘themasc.sg’ / lo ‘theneuter.sg’ with the neuter qué ‘what’.
El qué and lo qué alternate with qué ‘what’ when asking about non-human entities or expressions with propositional content which have been previously mentioned in discourse, are part of the shared knowledge or are strongly presupposed. They are not used in neutral or canonical questions, which ask for new information and whose domain is not contextually restricted, nor in aggressively-non-D-linked interrogatives (cf. *el/*lo qué demonios ‘what the hell’), which are used when the speaker considers that there is no accessible answer in the universe of discourse.
Building on some consolidated ideas about pronouns and determiners (Cardinaletti 1994, Cardinaletti and Starke 1999, Dechaine and Wiltschko 2002, van Koppen 2012), interrogative words (Bosque and Gutiérrez-Rexach 2009, Reis 2012, Beck and Reis 2018) and DP structure (Zamparelli 2000), it is proposed that el and lo are explicit marks of anaphoricity and occupy the core position of DP1. The analysis explains the main variation points about choosing between qué and el/lo qué in anaphoric contexts, and choosing the masculine or the neuter form as marker of anaphoricity.

Cristina Sánchez López is Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the Department of Lengua Española of the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (Spain) since 2000. She was assistant professor at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid from 1993 to 2000 and Visiting Researcher at the Harvard University (from October 2010 to June 2011). Her research has focused on Spanish syntax, mainly from a descriptive and theoretical view, but also from a historical perspective. She has published books, book chapters and articles on theoretical and descriptive aspects of quantification, determination, negation, degree modifiers, comparative structures, coordination, reflexive constructions, sentential modalities, sentential particles, adverbs, among others. She contributed two chapters negation and quantifiers to the Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (ed. by I. Bosque and V. Demonte), and several chapters to the Sintaxis histórica de la lengua española (ed. by C. Company, México, 2009-2015). She has supervised ten doctoral dissertations. She leads a supported project about Grammatical variation and microparameters, in coordination with research groups of the universities of Gerona, Autónoma de Madrid and Autónoma de Barcelona. She coordinates the second edition of the Nueva gramática de la Lengua Española (Real Academia Española/Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española).

Supervisor: Cristina Sánchez López (Universidad Complutense de Madrid / Università Ca’Foscari de Venezia)