Revealing pragmatic processes through a one-word answer: When the French reply Si

Noveck, Ira; Petit, Nicolas; Tian, Ye; Turco, Giuseppina

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2021.104245

Cited by 6 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…In the specific case of disagreement scenarios, processing a Positive Disagreeing response might be cognitively harder than a Negative one because it involves computing two negations rather than just one (i.e., negating the negative antecedent). This is compatible with the results reported by Noveck et al (2021), who find that when French speakers answer a negative question, they are slower to produce the specialized particle 'si' than the underspecified 'oui' and 'non'.…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 92%

“…In a recent study, Noveck et al (2021) provide some behavioural evidence for the markedness of Positive Disagreement meanings relative to others. They show that both child and adult French speakers take longer to provide 'si' responses to negative interrogatives compared to responses involving 'oui' or 'non' answers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such an analysis is dependent on the possibility of using 'oui' in both Positive Agreement and Positive Disagreement contexts; in other words, if 'oui' were only found in Positive Agreement contexts, then it would have to be analysed as exactly the kind of particle Roelofsen & Farkas (2015) argue does not exist. Indeed, a number of studies on French suggest that 'oui' is mainly used in Positive Agreement contexts (Diller 1984;Takagaki 2014;Noveck et al 2021, but see Pasquereau 2020a for an account of how the distribution of French particles depends on the inclusion of the prejacent in the response). Finally, the justification provided for the hierarchy in (1) is not entirely intuitive.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

You say yes, I say no. Investigating the link between meaning and form in response particles

Maldonado¹,

Culbertson²

2022

Preprint

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Response particles, like English ‘yes’ and ‘no’, are used to respond to polar questions or assertions and are found in all languages. However, the number of particles and the specific meanings they convey vary across languages. For example, in some languages particles mainly convey whether the response itself is positive or negative, while in others they convey whether the response is agreeing or disagreeing with previous discourse. Further, some languages have two response particles, while others have three, or even four. Recent work suggests that how meanings tend to be mapped to forms cross-linguistically might nevertheless be constrained. Roelofsen & Farkas (2015) suggest that indicating disagreement with a negative question or assertion (e.g., A: ‘Ally doesn’t eat meat.’ B: ‘Yes, he does.’) is more marked than indicating agreement with a positive assertion (e.g., A: ‘Ally eats meat.’ B: ‘Yes, he does’.). This difference in semantic markedness is argued to lead to a difference in form: more marked meanings are mapped to more specialized forms. Here we investigate this hypothesis in a series of behavioral experiments. Across our experiments, we find that participants are indeed sensitive to the differences in meaning that particles can convey. However, we fail to find evidence for all differences implicated by the hierarchy hypothesized in Roelofsen & Farkas (2015), and our results highlight an unexpected special role for Positive Agreement—the least marked meaning.

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 92%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

You say yes, I say no. Investigating the link between meaning and form in response particles

Maldonado¹,

Culbertson²

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In our experiment, however, we always used ‘Yes’ to confirm and ‘No’ to reject questions, and the intended meaning was disambiguated in the continuation (e.g., ‘Yes, he has’ vs. ‘No, he hasn’t’). In French, by contrast, ‘Si’ unambiguously confirms and ‘Non’ unambiguously rejects negative questions (Noveck et al, 2021 ). Since we are only interested in the question phase, however, this difference is not particularly relevant to our purposes.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Representing Polar Questions

Tian¹,

Tiel

Clin

et al. 2021

J Psycholinguist Res

Self Cite

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Although the linguistic properties of polar questions have been extensively studied, comparatively little is known about how polar questions are processed in real time. In this paper, we report on three eye-tracking experiments on the processing of positive and negative polar questions in English and French. Our results show that in the early stages, participants pay attention to both positive and negative states of affairs for both positive and negative questions. In the late stages, positive and certain negative polar questions were associated with a bias for the positive state, and this bias appears to be pragmatic in nature. We suggest that different biases in mental representations reflect the hearer’s reasoning about the speaker’s purposes of enquiry.

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“…In a recent study, Noveck et al (2021) provide some behavioural evidence for the markedness of Positive Disagreement meanings relative to others. They show that both child and adult…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

<em>You say yes, I say no</em>: Investigating the link between meaning and form in response particles

Maldonado

Culbertson

2023

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Response particles, like English ‘yes’ and ‘no’, are used to respond to polar questions or assertions and are found in all languages. However, the number of particles and the specific meanings they convey vary across languages. For example, in some languages particles mainly convey whether the response itself is positive or negative, while in others they convey whether the response is agreeing or disagreeing with previous discourse. Further, some languages have two response particles, while others have three, or even four. Recent work suggests that how meanings tend to be mapped to forms cross-linguistically might nevertheless be constrained. Roelofsen & Farkas (2015) suggest that indicating disagreement with a negative question or assertion (e.g., A: ‘Ally doesn’t eat meat.’ B: ‘Yes, he does.’) is more marked than indicating agreement with a positive assertion (e.g., A: ‘Ally eats meat.’ B: ‘Yes, he does’.). This difference in semantic markedness is argued to lead to a difference in form: more marked meanings are mapped to more specialized forms. Here we investigate this hypothesis in a series of behavioral experiments. Across our experiments, we find that participants are indeed sensitive to the differences in meaning that particles can convey. However, not all of the differences implicated by the hierarchy hypothesized in Roelofsen & Farkas (2015) are supported by our results, and we find evidence highlighting an unexpected special role for Positive Agreement—the least marked meaning.

show abstract

Revealing pragmatic processes through a one-word answer: When the French reply Si

Cited by 6 publications

References 50 publications

You say yes, I say no. Investigating the link between meaning and form in response particles

You say yes, I say no. Investigating the link between meaning and form in response particles

Representing Polar Questions

<em>You say yes, I say no</em>: Investigating the link between meaning and form in response particles

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