Building on our previous work on Spanish (Eguren and Sánchez López 2023), in this paper, we present a novel contrastive analysis of the syntactic and semantic properties of Spanish and Portuguese bare and complex neuter interrogative pronouns (Sp. qué ‘what’, el/lo qué ‘the what’; Port. que ‘what’, o que ‘the what’). It is shown that Sp. qué is an unmarked form that occurs both when the speaker assumes that the inquired constituent is part of the Common Ground and when (s)he does not, whereas the complex form el/lo qué is only used in the first scenario, thus indicating that el and lo in el/lo qué are explicit definiteness markers. As for Portuguese, it is shown that que is a weak form (in Cardinaletti and Starke 1994/1999’s sense) with a highly restricted distribution, while o que is the unmarked form appearing in all types of wh-constructions and interpretive contexts, which suggest that o in o que has the status of a (meaningless) expletive article. In the light of these observations, it is claimed that the distribution of Sp. qué and el/lo qué is semantically driven, whereas the distribution of Port. que and o que has a morpho-phonological basis. A formal analysis is further provided that structurally captures the aforementioned properties of bare and complex neuter interrogative pronouns in Spanish and Portuguese.
Eguren et al. (Mon,) studied this question.