Polar questions in Vietnamese consist of an affirmative sentence followed by a negation particle. Modern Vietnamese has three negation particles, but only two can occur in this function. This note ...proposes an account for this gap. The account is premised on the analysis of questions as sets of alternatives, and draws on facts of diachronic change gleaned from historical texts.
This article presents the quantitative findings from a comparative study of request for confirmation (RfC) sequences in British English (BE) and American English (AE). The study is part of a ...large-scale cross-linguistic research project on RfCs in ten languages. RfCs put forward a proposition about which the speaker claims some knowledge but for which they seek (dis)confirmation from an informed co-participant. The article examines linguistic resources for building RfCs and their responses in the two English varieties. RfCs are analyzed with regard to their syntactic design, polarity, modulation, inference marking, connectives, question tags, and the prosodic design of confirmables and potential question tags. Responses to RfCs are analyzed with regard to response type, the use, type and position of response tokens, (non-)minimal responses in turns with a response token, response prefacing, and repeat responses. BE and AE are found to resemble each other closely in most categories. A major exception is their prosodic design, however. Specifically, the preference for the final pitch pattern of RfCs differs markedly in the two varieties: BE shows a strong preference for final falling pitch; AE shows a preference for final rising pitch. This suggests that the two varieties have routinized distinct intonation patterns for expressing epistemic (un)certainty in RfCs.
•Connectionist model learns to produce novel complex polar questions.•Meaning structure in model explains structure-dependent syntactic generalization.•Model explains error patterns in complex ...questions over language development.•Corpus analysis supports assumptions about the model’s learning environment.•Explicit account of auxiliary inversion without innate syntactic constraints.
Nativist theories have argued that language involves syntactic principles which are unlearnable from the input children receive. A paradigm case of these innate principles is the structure dependence of auxiliary inversion in complex polar questions (Chomsky, 1968, 1975, 1980). Computational approaches have focused on the properties of the input in explaining how children acquire these questions. In contrast, we argue that messages are structured in a way that supports structure dependence in syntax. We demonstrate this approach within a connectionist model of sentence production (Chang, 2009) which learned to generate a range of complex polar questions from a structured message without positive exemplars in the input. The model also generated different types of error in development that were similar in magnitude to those in children (e.g., auxiliary doubling, Ambridge, Rowland, & Pine, 2008; Crain & Nakayama, 1987). Through model comparisons we trace how meaning constraints and linguistic experience interact during the acquisition of auxiliary inversion. Our results suggest that auxiliary inversion rules in English can be acquired without innate syntactic principles, as long as it is assumed that speakers who ask complex questions express messages that are structured into multiple propositions.
The aim of this paper is to capture the similarities and differences between assertions and polar questions so as to be able to account for the systematic partial overlap that exists in reactions to ...these speech acts in English and beyond. We first discuss the discourse components we assume and then define default assertions and default polar questions in a way that allows us to characterize two types of responses to these speech acts, confirming and reversing reactions. The common characteristics of assertions and polar questions are responsible for the fact that both allow these reactions; the differences between the two speech acts explain the different contextual effects confirming and reversing moves have depending on whether they react to an assertion or a polar question. We then examine the distribution of a set of ‘polarity’ particles in Romanian in terms of the notions defined in the rest of the paper and end with a series of predictions concerning polarity particles across languages.
This paper is a response to Enguehard (Natural Language Semantics 29(4):527–578,
2021
), who observes that presuppositions project in the same way from coordinations of declaratives and coordinations ...of polar questions, but existing mechanisms of projection from declaratives (e.g. Schlenker in Theoretical Linguistics 34(3):157–212,
2008
, Semantics and Pragmatics 2:1–78,
2009
) fail to scale to questions. His solution involves specifying a trivalent inquisitive semantics for (coordinations of) questions that bakes the various asymmetries of presupposition projection into the lexical entry of conjunction/disjunction. However, we argue that such a move faces both theoretical and empirical issues. Instead, we show that the data can be handled without moving to such an asymmetric inquisitive denotation, by adapting the novel pragmatic theory of
Limited Symmetry
(Kalomoiros in Proceedings of the 52nd annual meeting of the North East linguistic society, GLSA, Amherst,
2022
) to an inquisitive framework in a way that leaves the underlying semantics for conjunction symmetric and bivalent, while deriving the projection data.
Polar answers ENFIELD, N. J.; STIVERS, TANYA; BROWN, PENELOPE ...
Journal of linguistics,
04/2019, Letnik:
55, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
How do people answer polar questions? In this fourteen-language study of answers to questions in conversation, we compare the two main strategies; first, interjection-type answers such as uh-huh (or ...equivalents yes, mm, head nods, etc.), and second, repetition-type answers that repeat some or all of the question. We find that all languages offer both options, but that there is a strong asymmetry in their frequency of use, with a global preference for interjection-type answers. We propose that this preference is motivated by the fact that the two options are not equivalent in meaning. We argue that interjection-type answers are intrinsically suited to be the pragmatically unmarked, and thus more frequent, strategy for confirming polar questions, regardless of the language spoken. Our analysis is based on the semantic-pragmatic profile of the interjection-type and repetition-type answer strategies, in the context of certain asymmetries inherent to the dialogic speech act structure of question–answer sequences, including sequential agency and thematic agency. This allows us to see possible explanations for the outlier distributions found in ǂĀkhoe Haiǁom and Tzeltal.
As conversation is the most important way of using language, linguists and psychologists should combine forces to investigate how interlocutors deal with the cognitive demands arising during ...conversation. Linguistic analyses of corpora of conversation are needed to understand the structure of conversations, and experimental work is indispensable for understanding the underlying cognitive processes. We argue that joint consideration of corpus and experimental data is most informative when the utterances elicited in a lab experiment match those extracted from a corpus in relevant ways. This requirement to compare like with like seems obvious but is not trivial to achieve. To illustrate this approach, we report two experiments where responses to polar (yes/no) questions were elicited in the lab and the response latencies were compared to gaps between polar questions and answers in a corpus of conversational speech. We found, as expected, that responses were given faster when they were easy to plan and planning could be initiated earlier than when they were harder to plan and planning was initiated later. Overall, in all but one condition, the latencies were longer than one would expect based on the analyses of corpus data. We discuss the implication of this partial match between the data sets and more generally how corpus and experimental data can best be combined in studies of conversation.
Recent studies reveal that the values of finiteness, tense, modality and polarity in a clause elided under sluicing may be distinct from their correlates in the antecedent clause. Focusing on
in ...Hebrew (an instance of Argument Ellipsis), we first demonstrate that it is distinct from both Null Complement Anaphora and (null) pronominalization, and then show that the values of
(declarative, imperative, interrogative) can be distinct between the antecedent and the missing clause as well. Possible mismatches are bidirectional, ruling out “subset” theories of identity in ellipsis and challenging certain accounts of the semantics of polar questions. Implications for the general theory of ellipsis are discussed and evaluated.
•We measure perceived belief of ¡H*L% and L*HL% in Puerto Rican Spanish in various contexts.•Mild positive bias contexts did not significantly affect perceived belief for ¡H*L% and L*HL%.•Strong ...positive bias and mismatch bias significantly affected perceived belief for ¡H*L% and L*HL%.•We argue that ¡H*L% in PRS conveys one layer of meaning (polar question marking).•We argue that L*HL% in PRS conveys two layers of meaning (polar question marking+disbelief).
In the past decades, we have advanced significantly in our knowledge of intonational meaning, but few studies have tested experimentally the way in which discourse contexts affect intonational meaning. In this work we were specifically interested in how listeners use both intonation and discourse context to infer information about speaker belief states. We examined the effect of five bias types on two intonation contours used for polar questions (PQs) in Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS). The bias types consisted of unbiased, mild positive bias, strong positive bias and mismatch bias contexts. The intonation contours had been previously claimed to differ in the belief state information they convey – ¡H*L% is known to mark utterances as PQs without encoding specific belief state on the part of the speaker, while L*HL% is known to convey a state of disbelief on the part of the speaker (Armstrong, 2010). We hypothesized that the lack of belief and the presence of disbelief for these contours, respectively, would be perceived by listeners when these contours were heard in an unbiased context. We also predicted that listeners would rely on contextual bias more for the ¡H*L% contour than the L*HL% contour, and that the disbelief meaning would persist regardless of discourse context. Perceived belief scores were analyzed, and results show that different bias types affected perceived belief scores in different ways. Mild positive bias did not seem to affect perceived belief for the two contours, while strong positive bias and mismatch bias did. Since L*HL% conventionally conveys disbelief, a reversal effect was shown when it was heard in the strong belief context. Participants’ comments indicate that in such cases, an ironic interpretation of the contour is available. These results, in addition to the comments provided by participants, show that perceived belief will depend both on the type of contextual bias, as well as the type of information conveyed intonationally. This work provides more evidence for the dynamic relationship between specific context types and intonation contours that differ in terms of the amount and type of meaning they convey.
Abstract
This conversation analytic study examines the linguistic resources for indexing epistemic stance in second position in question sequences in Greek conversation. It targets three formats for ...providing affirming/confirming answers to polar questions: unmarked and marked positive response tokens, and repetitions. It is shown that the three formats display different functional distributions. Unmarked response tokens do ‘simple’ answering, marked response tokens provide overt confirmations, and repetitional answers assert the respondent’s epistemic authority besides confirming the question’s proposition. Unmarked and marked response tokens accept the questioner’s epistemic stance, whereas repetitional answers may accept or resist the epistemic terms of the question, depending on the action being implemented by the question. This study sheds light on the organization of questioning and answering in Greek conversation and the role of epistemics in the design of polar answers.
PDF
