¿Cómo va a ser posible?

Abstract We analyze the use and distribution of Spanish synthetic and periphrastic future-inflected wh -interrogatives in a corpus of informal Spanish conversations, within Linell’s (2009) Dialogical Theory of Language. Our corpus analysis reveals that future-inflected interrogatives realize three types of discourse functions: information requests, interactional challenges, and requests for inference, each clearly distinguishable in terms of their distribution at the sentence and discourse level. The results highlight the importance of speaker attitude and, particularly, their expectations regarding the answerability of the request. Use of the synthetic future is common in requests to inference, in which the hearer is not expected to be able to answer the question, whereas use of the periphrastic future is prototypical in requests for information and interactional challenges, indicating a grammaticalization path towards modal meanings. Our findings underscore the value of corpus-based pragmatic analysis for understanding how grammatical choices reflect interactional meaning-making.