¿Hola? Counter-expectation and stance in non-canonical uses of a greeting form in Spanish

Abstract

This article examines the discourse-pragmatic uses of interrogative ¿hola? in contemporary written European Spanish. While hola is conventionally described as a greeting, its interrogative use has received little attention and remains largely undocumented. Drawing on 364 tokens from large web-based corpora, the study shows that ¿hola? is predominantly used as an addressee-oriented, reactive device that targets prior discourse and encodes evaluation. The analysis identifies a clear functional pattern: rather than initiating interaction or expressing surprise alone, ¿hola? typically presents a preceding contribution as unexpected, inappropriate, or norm-violating, thereby projecting a stance-bearing response. These uses are strongly associated with turn-medial position, where the form is typically used in pivot-like configurations linking prior discourse to a subsequent evaluative or argumentative move. The findings show that the interpretation of ¿hola? depends crucially on its sequential placement and its relation to prior discourse. In this respect, it works as a resource for managing interaction and negotiating shared expectations, instead of as a carrier of propositional meaning. The study argues that these uses are best understood within the domain of interactive grammar, as a redeployment of a greeting formula into an interrogative, reactive device for managing interaction and expressing stance. More broadly, the results illustrate how a conventional greeting form can function as a compact resource for encoding counter-expectational evaluation in context.