In this paper, we demonstrate that, like frequency, morphosyntactic persistence can have a conserving effect on language change. To substantiate this claim, we analyze the alternation between the Spanish past subjunctive forms ending in –ra and –se (as in comiera and comiese ‘had eaten’). Due to the ongoing replacement of –se by –ra, persistence and frequency are the best predictors of the alternation in our data. First, the persistence effect of a prior –se is significantly greater than the persistence effect of a prior –ra. Second, although –se is basically restricted to third person singular morphology in contexts without persistence, when primed by –se this restriction is drastically reduced. Our results also shed light on the relationship between frequency and persistence in language change. Although both result in conservation, the conserving effect of frequency causes irregularity such as the paradigmatic atrophy of Spanish –se forms. In contrast, persistence can temporarily re-establish paradigmatic regularity and consequently strengthen the cognitive representation of obsolescing constructions. However, this resuscitating effect of persistence appears to be restricted to low-frequency –se forms; because they are generally more entrenched, the activation of high-frequency –se forms relies less on persistence effects.

This study analyzes the pragmatics of in-situ wh- and complex bare wh-interrogatives such as ¿de qué? ‘of what?’ in spoken Spanish, developing a typology of their discourse functions. The interpretation of such postposed wh-interrogatives depends on inference processes by the hearer that take as cues both the degree to which the interrogative proposition and the referent of the interrogative pronoun/adverb are cognitively accessible. This relationship follows from the fact that on the basis of the combination of the information states of the interlocutors (i.e. the degree of accessibility of the proposition and the referent of wh) with the information structure of this type of wh-interrogatives, the utterer of the wh-interrogative can predict the pragmatic effect of a given postposed wh-interrogative token in the hearer. I establish a hierarchy of the different discourse functions on the basis of their potential to change the current ‘Question under Discussion’ (QuD). In particular, the analysis demonstrates that postposed wh-interrogatives that realize or imply a challenge to a previous utterance by the addressee of the interrogative have weaker pragmatic conditions than other uses. Consequently, I theorize that these uses are crucial for our understanding of the expansion of the use of in-situ wh-interrogatives in languages such as French and Brazilian Portuguese.

Previous studies of the historical development of partial interrogatives have postulated a change from contexts in which the proposition of the interrogative has been explicitly mentioned in the previous discourse, to contexts in which the proposition is discourse-new. The present paper explores whether the historical increase in the usage frequency of Brazilian Portuguese in-situ wh-interrogatives represents the same process. Using data from a large corpus of BP theater texts dated between the 19th and 21st century, several discourse functions of InSituWh are identified, the most frequent of which are cataphorical questions, which serve to either open up a question unrelated to the current question under discussion, or raise further questions about the current question under discussion, and rhetorical questions, which question the validity or relevance of a previously mentioned proposition. Rhetorical questions typically do not trigger a response by the interlocutor and are used with psychological verbs and morphologically simple interrogative pronouns. A statistical analysis of the diachronic distribution of InSituWh in the data reveals an increase in the usage frequency of InSituWh especially in contexts in which the proposition is discourse-new. However, the results also indicate that this increase is not due to a grammatical change of InSituWh but rather reflects a consolidation of the rhetorical question function of InSituWh within the genre of theater plays.

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