L2 interpretation of negative polar questions: Evidence from online experiments

Expectation Biases and Context Management with Negative Polar Questions

This paper examines certain distinctive discourse properties of preposed negative yes/no questions (NPQs), like Isn’t Jane coming too?. Unlike other types of polar questions, NPQs ∼p? invariably convey a bias toward a particular answer, where the polarity of the bias is opposite of the polarity of the question: using an NPQ ∼p? necessarily expresses the speaker’s prior expectation that the posi...

Negation, alternatives, and negative polar questions in American English

A longstanding puzzle in the semantics/pragmatics of questions has been the subtle differences between positive (e.g. Is it . . . ? ), low negative (Is it not . . . ? ), and high negative polar questions (Isn’t it . . . ? ). While they are intuitively ways of asking “the same question”, each has distinct felicity conditions and gives rise to different inferences about the speaker’s attitude tow...

Phonetic effects of focus and "tonal crowding" in intonation: Evidence from Greek polar questions

This paper deals with the intonation of polar (yes/no) questions in Greek. An experiment was devised which systematically manipulated the position of the focused word in the question (and therefore of the intonation nucleus) and the position of the last stressed syllable. Our results showed that all questions had a low level stretch associated with the focused word and a final rise–fall movemen...

On Polar Questions

We first show on a number of examples that positive polar questions, negative polar questions and alternative questions (containing a proposition and its negation) are not interchangeable in context. We will account for the differences pragmatically, using decision theory. We offer a simple classification of three types of use, which covers a number of phenomena hitherto not systematically deal...

Online Appendix: Effect of Temporal Spacing between Advertising Exposures: Evidence from Online Field Experiments