High negation questions and epistemic bias

Goodhue, Daniel

doi:10.18148/sub/2019.v23i1.544

Cited by 2 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Relating outer A-not-A to polarity focus thus seems dubious. Moreover, Goodhue (2019) points out that polarity focus but not high negation requires the sort of antecedent needed to license prosodic prominence shifts more generally. A unified account of high negation and polarity may not be appropriate even for other languages.…”

Section: Previous Accounts For High Negation Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(3) Zhangsan asks Wangwu: a. The current paper provides a unified analysis that explains the facts mentioned above by treating Mandarin A-not-A questions as a type of high-negation question and adopting Goodhue's (2019) epistemic operator and deriving the positively biased reading from the resulted unbalanced partitions.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Section 4 reviews previous accounts for high negations and discusses their application to Mandarin. Section 5 shows how Goodhue's (2019) operator and pragmatic principles can successfully apply to the Mandarin data. This section also provides explanations for bias cancelations.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…: Is it the case that Lisi often watches TV? Goodhue (2019) proposes several tests for English to support the argument that the negation operator in high negation questions is above the matrix TP as well. For example, the word again triggers the presupposition that the proposition denoted by its complement has happened before.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…English negation questions parallel the same property: English high negation questions necessarily convey that the speaker is epistemically biased, but low negation questions do not have biased readings. As shown by ( 14) taken from Goodhue (2019), in the context of (14a) where the questioner Lucy lacks expectations toward Kate's being home or not, the low negation question is perfect but the high negation question is unacceptable; while in the context of (14b) where Lucy has a prior expectation that the proposition embedded under negation is true, the high negation question becomes felicitous.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Derive the biased reading of <i>A-not-A</i> questions in Mandarin

Wang

2024

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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Among many forms of A-not-A questions in Mandarin Chinese, the shi-not-shi question is found to be unique in that it obligatorily gives rise to a biased reading toward its prejacent, so-called positive bias. The previous pragmatic approach by Ye (2020) establishes a link between focus in polar questions and question bias to explain this biased reading. However, the current study finds that two other A-not-A questions formed by epistemic modals, hui-not-hui and keneng-not-keneng which are not focus markers, obligatorily produce positively biased readings as well. I propose that biased A-not-A questions are a type of high-negation questions with A-not-A residing outside of TP. shi, hui and keneng should all be analyzed as epistemic modals which are the overt realization of Goodhue’s (2019) epistemic operator scoped by the negator. The positively biased reading is derived from the resulting unbalanced partition based on general pragmatic principles. This analysis from the semantic aspect provides new evidence for the argument that the first A has reality only in PF. Furthermore, the Mandarin Chinese data lends evidence to Goodhue’s (2019) argument that there exists a doxastic speech operator between NegP and TP in high negation questions. The paper also provides explanations for previously remaining questions on bias cancelation by the stress marker daodi and factive predicates like zhidao (“know”).

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Section: Previous Accounts For High Negation Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Derive the biased reading of <i>A-not-A</i> questions in Mandarin

Wang

2024

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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Verum accent IS VERUM, but not always focus

Bill

Koev

2021

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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This paper studies the occurrence of verum accent in declaratives and polar interrogatives. Verum accent exhibits two kinds of interpretational effect: (i) it requires an epistemic conflict across sentence types and (ii) it may also convey a negative speaker bias in polar interrogatives. We argue that the former effect is due to a presuppositional VERUM operator and that the latter effect arises from the possibility of said operator carrying polarity focus. Our proposal implies that verum accenting and polarity focus are two distinct phenomena that interact in interesting ways.

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High negation questions and epistemic bias

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Derive the biased reading of <i>A-not-A</i> questions in Mandarin

Derive the biased reading of <i>A-not-A</i> questions in Mandarin

Verum accent IS VERUM, but not always focus

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