Intonation, <i>yes</i> and <i>no</i>

Abstract

English polar particles yes and no are interchangeable in response to negative sentences, that is, either one can be used to convey both positive and negative responses. We provide a critical discussion of recent research into this phenomenon (Kramer & Rawlins 2009;Krifka 2013;Roelofsen & Farkas 2015;Holmberg 2016), which leads to three questions: Does the intonation produced on yes and no depend on whether the response is positive or negative, and can intonation affect the interpretation of bare polar particle responses? Which particles do speakers prefer to use when? Are preference patterns sensitive to the polarity of preceding sentences in the context? In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that the contradiction contour (Liberman & Sag 1974) is an intonation that is commonly produced on positive responses to negative sentences, and that it affects hearers' interpretations of bare particle responses. Beyond intonation, our experimental results add new evidence regarding speakers' preferences for using yes and no in response to negative polar questions and rising declaratives. Finally, our results suggest that preference patterns are not sensitive to the polarity of context sentences.

Individual empathy levels affect gradual intonation-meaning mapping: The case of biased questions in Salerno Italian

“…A typical example of biased question in their analysis is represented by tag questions, which overtly include both a declarative and an interrogative component. Apart from tag questions (also treated by Ladd, 1981), bias appears to be an intrinsic property of negative polar questions (Ladd, 1981;Büring & Gunlogson, 2000;Asher & Reese, 2005;2007; see also Goodhue & Wagner, 2018) and declarative questions.…”

A unified account of inquisitive and assertive rising declaratives

“…I take intonation to contribute non-at-issue meaning, in line with prior work (e.g., Ward & Hirschberg 1985, Goodhue & Wagner 2018. I propose that the rise associated with rising declaratives and polar questions ' ' signals the speaker's lack of commitment to the truth of a proposition q.…”

The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody

“…Among these we find, for instance, a rich literature on English rising declaratives (e.g. Gunlogson 2003Gunlogson , 2008Nilsenova 2006;Truckenbrodt 2006;Trinh and Crnič 2011;Farkas and Roelofsen 2017), an account of question intonation in Catalan (Prieto and Borràs-Comes 2018), and an account of the contradiction contour in English (Goodhue and Wagner 2018; for an earlier account, see e.g. Bolinger 1982).…”

“…L* L-H% Goodhue and Wagner (2018) offer a more precise characterization of the contradiction contour as requiring contextual evidence against the proposition expressed. For instance, A's utterance in (5) provides contextual evidence both for the proposition that A asserts and for the proposition embedded under the verb said, hence against the content of B's utterances in both (5a) and (5b), licensing the contradiction contour in each.…”

“…(e.g. among many others, Nash and Mulac 1980;Gussenhoven and Rietveld 1991;Hirschberg and Ward 1992;Chen et al 2004a;Watson et al 2008b;Jeong and Potts 2016;Goodhue and Wagner 2018). Let us consider De Marneffe and Tonhauser (2016) as an example to illustrate that relating empirical findings to theory is not straightforward.…”