Biased polar questions in English and Japanese

Puzzling response particles: An experimental study on the German answering system

“…Furthermore, future research must include the investigation of the prosody of particle responses, which in recent studies on 45 early access Claus, Meijer, Repp & Krifka English and Catalan has been shown to play an important role (Goodhue et al 2013, Goodhue & Wagner 2015, González-Fuente, Tubau, Espinal & Prieto 2015. A further highly relevant task for future research is to identify the effects of factors such as negation scope and bias of polar questions (e.g., Romero & Han 2004, Sudo 2013, the latter being an issue that we have not addressed here at all.…”

Negation, Alternatives, and Negative Polar Questions in American English

“…This positive prior speaker bias conflicts 14 with a negative bias of a different sort first discussed in detail by Büring & Gunlogson (2000): what they call compelling contextual evidence (Sudo (2013) calls this 'evidential bias', Northrup (2014) 'contextual bias').…”

“…Romero & Han (2004) discuss it as a ' positive epistemic implicature', by which they presumably mean something more like a conventional implicature than a conversational one since they claim it to arise obligatorily in HiNegQs. Along the same lines, Sudo (2013) calls it an 'epistemic bias' and Northrup (2014) simply calls it 'speaker bias'. While some of these labels suggest that this prior speaker bias is purely epistemic, many authors have made the point that (as discussed above for Ladd's Moosewood example), this bias reflects some combination of epistemic and bouletic factors, as the following examples from Huddleston & Pullum (2002) illustrate (see also Reese (2007) for further discussion of these examples).…”

Questions in Discourse: an Overview

“…Another common strategy involves the use of a specialized interrogative particle that distinguishes an interrogative from a declarative sentence. Question tags, in contrast, often add some bias to the question, by suggesting that speaker or addressee may have prior expectations regarding the questioned proposition or its negative polar counterpart, cf., e.g., Reese & Asher (2006), Sudo (2013). Sometimes the interrogative mood is also marked in ways that are not specific for interrogatives and which can be found in declaratives as well.…”