Aren’t Prosody and Syntax Marking Bias in Questions?

Abstract

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.

Isn’t there more than one way to bias a polar question?

“…Wood 2014 for examples.) So, neither their experimental results nor researcher judgments provide evidence for the rise = checking-¬p vs. fall = checking-p analysis inRomero et al (2017)/Arnhold et al (2021).…”

“…17 Romero et al (2017) and Arnhold et al (2021) argue that their participants speak an uptalk variety of English, and hypothesize that the shallower rises they found would be final falls in non-uptalk dialects of American English, and thus that in non-uptalk dialects, the prosodic distinction is actually final rise for checking-¬p and final fall for checking-p. First, I am skeptical of the underlying assumption that there is a clear-cut distinction between uptalk and non-uptalk dialects such that all utterances rise in uptalk dialects. Instead, I think all dialects include some amount of uptalk; see Shokeir (2008) for evidence that uptalk is not as recent a phenomenon as often assumed.…”

“…So, we must search for evidence beyond polarity items. Romero et al (2017) claim to demonstrate that prosody exhibits the inner/outer ambiguity in English (see also Arnhold et al 2021). The production experiment is designed to capture the prosody speakers produce when their HNQ-p is double-checking p or ¬p.…”

Polar Express: Polar Question Forms Expressing Bias-Evidence Conflicts in Italian

“…Specifically, in this work, the positive bias has been interpreted as the expectation of a positive answer depending on the positive epistemic stance towards a previous presupposition. Different works have focused on the study of bias in polar questions in different languages and/or varieties [Malamud et al, 2015, Frana et al, 2019, Orrico et al, 2020, Arnhold et al 2021.…”