Positive and negative questions in discourse

Lingua, 2015

This paper investigates the interpretation and processing of simple transitive Catalan sentences with multiple negative expressions experimentally. Our results provide empirical confirmation that Negative Concord (NC) is the preferred and faster interpretation for negative sentences that either omit or contain the overt negative marker no 'not'. However, they also reveal that, in contrast to traditional descriptions of Catalan and independently of particular favoring contexts, a non-negligible amount of Double Negation (DN) readings arises, mainly when the negative marker co-occurs with preverbal Negative Concord Items (NCIs), and when these NCIs have a complex DP structure. Our results further suggest that two populations could be distinguished: one for whom the negative marker is optional and leaves the favored NC reading essentially unaffected, and another where the co-presence of no significantly increases DN readings.

Among languages that employ specialized particles for answering polar questions, two major groups are known: Positive-Negative (P-N) and Agreement-Disagreement (A-D). English and Italian are examples of the former group, Japanese an example of the latter. It has occasionally been remarked in the literature that at least in some P-N languages a narrow focus in a negative polar question affects the choice of responding particles: namely, the answering pattern shifts to A-D. In the present contribution, this claim is thoroughly tested experimentally with two forced choice experiments that investigate the choice of responding particles in answers to Italian negative polar questions both with and without narrow foci. Our results bring clear support to the claim of the exceptional answering pattern to negative polar questions with narrow foci. Two candidate accounts are presented, in accord with the two main current lines of research on responding particles: an ellipsis account and an anaphoric account. In both cases, we will argue that a crucial role is played by the interaction of the narrow focus with sentential negation in the questions.

Argumentation, 1992

In this paper we investigate the interplay between lexicon, syntax, intonation and pragmatics in Sardinian polar questions. To this end, a production study was designed to elicit polar questions with different bias and polarity conditions by means of the Discourse Completion Task Methodology. The resulting data were then prosodically and syntactically annotated using Praat. The results can be summarized as follows. Regarding lexico-syntactic markers, the particle a functions as a mitigator or politeness marker, whereas constituent fronting and negation correspond to positive and negative polarity respectively. In addition, two main intonational patterns can be distinguished: the ¡H+L* L% pattern, which expresses “lack of bias”, and the ¡H*+L L- pattern, which conveys the speaker bias towards the proposition.

2011

Abstract Projective contents, which include presuppositional inferences and Potts'(2005) conventional implicatures, are meanings which are projected when a construction is embedded, as standardly identified by the 'Family of Sentences' diagnostic (eg Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 1990).

Children and adults have been reported to differ in their interpretation of scopally ambiguous sen- tences such as Every horse didn’t jump over the fence (Musolino 1998; Gualmini 2004; Gualmini et al. 2008; Musolino & Lidz 2006; see also Lidz & Musolino 2002; Musolino et al. 2000; Musolino & Lidz 2006; Kra ̈mer 2000; Moscati & Crain 2014; Moscati et al. 2016, among many others). A recent approach in the literature treats this difference as fully pragmatic in nature. In particular, Gualmini et al. (2008) have proposed an explanation based on what they call the Question-Answer Requirement (QAR), which locates the source of the difference in the understood Question Under Discussion (QUD) in the context. The main idea behind the QAR is that any sentence is to be understood as an answer to a QUD. As a consequence, in the case of scopally ambiguous sentences, a given reading of the sentence is accessible (to adults and children) only if it constitutes a possible answer to the contextual QUD. Children and adults are then claimed to differ only in how they handle and accommodate QUDs. In particular, if the reading that would answer the salient QUD is false in the context, adults, but not children, are able to accommodate a new QUD in order to access the true interpretation of the ambiguous sentence. Given that it locates the difference only in the way QUDs are managed, the QAR approach predicts that if the effects of the QUD are controlled for, children and adults should perform alike. In this study, we indirectly probed the role of the QUD in scope ambiguity resolution by moving to a linguistic context where there is no sentence that constitutes an answer to the relevant QUD. To do so, we tested children’s and adults’ comprehension of scopally ambiguous questions, rather than declaratives. The main finding 1 of our experiment is that 4–6-year-old children and adults display the same rates of access to the inverse scope readings of such questions. This finding is consistent with a general assumption underlying the QAR approach, which is that there is no grammatical difference in children’s and adults’ ability to access inverse scope readings. Indeed, once the QUD factor is controlled for, the two groups perform alike. We further discuss the compatibility of our results with two alternative hypotheses concerning the QAR and the interpretation of questions. The first possibility is that the QUD is simply not a factor that affects the interpretation of questions. This would explain why we found no difference between children and adults. In this scenario, the QAR approach to scope interpretation should not be extended to questions. The second possibility is that the QAR approach should be formulated in such a way that it can be extended to explain performance on questions, in particular invoking a notion of super- question and sub-question (Roberts, 1996). In this latter scenario, the lack of a difference between children and adults would be due to the fact that our experimental contexts made salient a super-question that facilitated inverse scope interpretations. We end by discussing a possible formulation of such an extended QAR approach to questions, and sketch a follow-up experiment that could distinguish between the two scenarios just mentioned.

Language, 2013

The goal of this paper is to analyze the semantic contribution of evaluative adverbs (EAs) such as unfortunately in several languages of the Romance family, namely French, Catalan and Spanish. Following Bonami and Godard (2008), we propose to analyze EAs as items that convey projective meaning in order to explain their peculiar semantic behavior (they cannot be directly denied, do not change the truth-conditions of the proposition they evaluate, and are not factive) and their unacceptability in negative assertions. Unlike what has been claimed for many other languages, French allows EAs in questions French allows EAs in questions, and we show that Catalan and Spanish, too, as long as some conditions are met. We propose an account that derives their interpretation in both assertions and questions: integrated French EAs take the proposition to their right and if they appear in a wh-question, their interpretation is similar to that of unconditionals. In contrast, non-integrated EAs in Catalan and Spanish have scope over a set of propositions, and are only acceptable in questions if the speaker is biased towards one of the propositions in the set denoted by the question. The acceptability of EAs in such questions, rejected by previous literature, is confirmed by an experimental study. María, María, por desgracia? Spanish unfortunately?

2010

2001

Double negation is a phenomenon where two negatives cancel each other out, thereby yielding a positive meaning. Previous research found that children did not have knowledge of double negation until the age of seven or later. We argue that the observed difficulty of children in previous research is due to an artefact of the experimental task where the target structure was presented without the support of an appropriate context. To see whether preschool children have knowledge of double negation, we used experimental tasks which presented the structure in a plausible context. The results show that 5-year-olds already know that two negatives cancel each other out. By age 6 children are even able to produce double negation in an adult-like manner. This is evidence that double negation does not pose significant difficulty for young children if a plausible context is provided.