Preguntó (que) si qué quería: si como operador interrogativo en español vernáculo

This article studies the syntactic of embedded questions in some vernacular varieties of contemporary Spanish. These structures are characterized by the anti-normative use of si (if)conjunction, optionally preceded by que in some dialects, to introduce partial or wh-questions (me preguntó (que) si qué quería: ‘(s)he asked (that) if what I wanted’). Based on cases extracted from the “colloquial written record”, the article analyzes the sentence structure of these sequences and their areal distribution in third-millennium Spanish. As much as they are, due to their genesis or their frequency, marginal constructions, these schemes reveal the appearance of an interrogative operator in the functional configuration of indirect questions.The study confirms that nonstandard varieties significantly manifest covert categories of Spanish grammar and encourages to review traditional hypotheses about embedded questions.