Untangling syntactic and morphophonological effects on Brazilian Portuguese Wh-interrogatives

From a corpus of 53 sociolinguistic interviews, this paper analyzes variation among four structures of Wh-interrogatives in Brazilian Portuguese (Onde voce mora?, Onde que voce mora?, Onde e que voce mora?, Voce mora onde? ‘Where do you live?’) and contrasts the results of multivariate analyses, focusing on two different envelopes of variation (Variable position of the wh-word and Variable que) and two factor groups (Wh-word and Syntactic function). We show that variable position of the wh-word is mostly conditioned by syntactic factors, whereas variable que is mostly conditioned by morphophonological factors.