Bias in polar questions: Evidence from English and German production experiments

Domaneschi, Filippo; Romero, Maribel; Braun, Bettina

doi:10.5334/gjgl.27

Cited by 23 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Although to our knowledge it has not previously been tested whether prosody marks the checked proposition of English HiNQs, an observation by Domaneschi et al (2017) hints that this may be the case. They showed that in a context in which a speaker with an existing bias for p encountered evidence that their addressee believed ¬ p (as in (1) above), when German participants selected HiNQs in the experiment they uniformly realized them with a nuclear pitch rise, whereas British English participants sometimes used rises and sometimes falls.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…Instead, the felicity of their use depends both on the speaker’s prior beliefs regarding the checked proposition p and the new evidence provided by the conversational context. For example, Domaneschi, Romero, and Braun (2017) manipulated the original speaker bias – see (1a) with speaker bias for the proposition p – and contextual evidence – see (1b) with evidence for ¬ p . They found that in such situations with conflicting biases, English participants most often chose negative polar questions with negation in a high position, as in (1c); by contrast, positive polar questions as in (1d) were almost never uttered by participants as a response in the same context and thus seem inappropriate (see Domaneschi et al, 2017, for empirical results on these and other combinations of biases).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Isn’t there a train in the early morning? d. #Is there a train in the early morning? (Domaneschi et al, 2017, p. 12)…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Aren’t Prosody and Syntax Marking Bias in Questions?

Arnhold

Braun²,

Romero

2020

Lang Speech

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As first observed by Ladd in 1981, English polar questions with high negation (e.g., Aren’t they adding a menu item?) can be used both to check the speaker’s belief that the proposition p is true (e.g., p = they are adding a menu item) and to check the addressee’s belief that p is not true (¬ p). We hypothesized that this ambiguity can be disambiguated prosodically. We further hypothesized that the prosodic disambiguation is absent in German, because the checked proposition can be marked morpho-syntactically, with questions with high negation checking p and low negation questions (e.g., Are they not adding a menu item?) checking ¬ p. A production study tested these hypotheses with 24 speakers of Western Canadian English and German each (764 and 767 total utterances, respectively). The results showed that, when the speaker originally believed p and the addressee implied ¬ p, English speakers preferred questions with high negation over low negation questions, confirming Ladd’s observation, and used intonation to mark whose proposition they were checking, as hypothesized. By contrast, German speakers marked this distinction morpho-syntactically, realizing mostly questions with high negation to check their own proposition and low negation questions to check the addressee’s proposition. Their prosody, in turn, was largely determined by the morpho-syntactic question form. The study further manipulated the speaker’s certainty of the checked proposition, but, in contrast to studies on Romance languages, found that certainty itself was not marked.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Aren’t Prosody and Syntax Marking Bias in Questions?

Arnhold

Braun²,

Romero

2020

Lang Speech

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“…7 At no point was gender found to be a significant factor for any of the contexts, and so this was removed from the models. 7 Evidential context has been shown to affect speakers' choice of question form (Domaneschi, Romero, & Braun 2017). I leave evidence as a variable in the models presented here where relevant, but do not discuss the effects; see Jamieson (2018) for details.…”

Section: (20)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Viewing dialect change through acceptability judgments: A case study in Shetland dialect

Jamieson

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Acceptability judgments are the standard methodology for investigating syntactic variation. While acceptability judgments have been shown to be reliable in cases of assumed stable variation, there has been little discussion of how syntactic change plays out in judgment tasks. This is despite evidence from sociolinguistics that at the end of a change, speakers' behaviour in production is "unpredictable". How does this "unpredictability" play out in judgment tasks, where speakers are asked to perform metalinguistic assessments on their use of a changing variable? In this paper, I present the results of acceptability judgment tasks focusing on a particle,-n, available in some biased questions in the Shetland dialect of Scots. This variety has been claimed to be rapidly obsolescing (e.g. Smith & Durham 2011). Combining quantitative analysis of acceptability judgments with qualitative comments made by the speakers, I argue young speakers exhibit perceptual hyperdialectalism in their judgments: extending acceptability of the variable to contexts where older speakers don't accept it; giving higher ratings than expected given their qualitative comments when the variable is being lost, and generally rating examples which could be perceived as "dialectal" higher. I argue these patterns arise from Preston's (2013) definition of linguistic insecurity: younger speakers are aware their grammar diverges from a more " traditional" grammar, but the traditional grammar is an important identity marker. These speakers therefore attempt to demonstrate knowledge of an older grammar-but their knowledge is not accurate. These patterns highlight the importance of combining quantitative and qualitative analysis in dialect syntax.

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“…It is felicitous in different kinds of contexts, i.e. it has a different bias profile from a NPQ with high negation (see Domaneschi, Romero & Braun 2017 for a discussion of German NPQs). We suggest that the NRQs in (30a.i&ii) differ from each other in a similar way.…”

Section: Polarity-sensitive Items In Rejecting Questions: Evidence Fomentioning

confidence: 99%

Biased declarative questions in Swedish and German

Seeliger¹,

Repp

2018

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

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To Appear in Dimroth, Christine & Stefan Sudhoff (Eds.): The grammatical realization of polarity.Theoretical and experimental approaches. Amsterdam: Benjamins.This paper investigates a class of biased questions with declarative syntax in Swedish and German that differ in their bias from the familiar class of declarative questions: rejecting questions (RQs), which may occur with or without negation. We provide a semantic-pragmatic analysis of RQs and show for negative RQs that the negation is non-propositional. We analyze the non-propositional negation as the speech-act modifying operator FALSUM (Repp 2009a(Repp , 2013. In both languages, FALSUM interacts with modal particles whose meanings relate to contrast and the epistemic state of the speaker. We propose that the illocutionary operator in RQs is REJECTQ, which is an operator that comes with presuppositions that are the source of the particular bias of RQs.

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Bias in polar questions: Evidence from English and German production experiments

Cited by 23 publications

References 9 publications

Aren’t Prosody and Syntax Marking Bias in Questions?

Aren’t Prosody and Syntax Marking Bias in Questions?

Viewing dialect change through acceptability judgments: A case study in Shetland dialect

Biased declarative questions in Swedish and German

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