Abstract. Preposed negation yes/no (yn)-questions like

No abstract

Different polar question forms (e.g., Do you / Do you not / Don't you / Really? Do you... have a car?) are not equally appropriate in all situations. The present experiments investigate which combinations of original speaker belief and contextual evidence influence the choice of question type in English and German. Our results show that both kinds of bias interact: in both languages, positive polar questions are typically selected when there is no original speaker belief and positive or non-informative contextual evidence; low negation questions (Do you not...?) are most frequently chosen when no original belief meets negative contextual evidence; high negation questions (Don't you...?) are prompted when positive original speaker belief is followed by negative or non-informative contextual evidence; positive questions with really are produced most frequently when a negative original bias is combined with positive contextual evidence. In string-identical forms, there are prosodic differences across crucial conditions.

This paper sets up a framework for Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) semantics that brings together ideas from different recent approaches addressing some shortcomings of LTAG semantics based on the derivation tree. The approach assigns underspecified semantic representations and semantic feature structure descriptions to elementary trees. Semantic computation is guided by the derivation tree and consists of adding feature value equations to the descriptions. A rigorous formal definition of the framework is given. Then, within this framework, an analysis is proposed that accounts for the different scopal properties of quantificational NPs (including nested NPs), adverbs, raising verbs and attitude verbs. Furthermore, by integrating situation variables in the semantics, different situation binding possibilities are derived for different types of quantificational elements.

This article presents the observation that disjunction cannot take wide scope in negative non-wh-questions and declaratives with a preposed negative element. This rules out the alternative question reading for non-wh-questions with preposed negation and the wide scope or reading for neg-inverted declaratives. We show that effects parallel to the ones associated with preposed negation can be reproduced in affirmative non-wh-questions and declaratives when focus is involved. We propose that preposed negation in non-wh-questions and preposed negative adverbials in declaratives necessarily contribute focus marking (in particular, verum focus) and argue that the lack of wide scope disjunction reading in both declaratives and non-wh-questions results as a by-product of the interaction between focus and the LF syntax of disjunctive structures, which we argue involves ellipsis.