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

Abstract

I show that speaker bias in polarity focus questions (PFQs) is context sensitive, while speaker bias in high negation questions (HNQs) is context insensitive. This leads me to develop separate accounts of speaker bias in each of these kinds of polar questions. I argue that PFQ bias derives from the fact that they are frequently used in conversational contexts in which an answer to the question has already been asserted by an interlocutor, thus expressing doubt about the prior assertion. This derivation explains their context sensitivity, and the fact that similar bias arises from polar questions that lack polarity focus. I also provide novel evidence that the prejacents of HNQs lack negation, and thus only have an outer negation reading (see, e.g., Ladd in Papers from the seventeenth regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, vol. 17, pp. 164–171, 1981; Romero and Han in Linguistics and Philosophy 27(5):609–658, 2004; Krifka in Contrastiveness in information structure, alternatives and scalar implicatures, pp. 359–398, 2017; AnderBois in Questions in discourse, pp. 118–171, 2019; Frana and Rawlins in Semantics and Pragmatics 12(16):1–48, 2019; Jeong in Journal of Semantics 38(1):49–94, 2020). Based on a treatment of HNQs as denoting unbalanced partitions (Romero and Han in Linguistics and Philosophy 27(5):609–658, 2004), and competition with their positive polar question alternatives, I propose a novel derivation of speaker bias in HNQs as a conversational implicature. Roughly, if the speaker is ignorant, then a positive polar question will be more useful because it is more informative, so the use of an HNQ conveys that the speaker is not ignorant. The denotation of the HNQ then makes clear which way the speaker is biased. The result separates high negation from verum focus, and I argue that it is more parsimonious and has better empirical coverage than prior accounts.

Epistemic bias anti-lincenses NPIs in polar questions

“…Now, two observations have been made about declarative questions. The first is that they are, by default, biased: they suggest that there is information supporting the prejacent proposition (Gunlogson 2002;Safarova 2005;Trinh 2014;Goodhue 2022). In (43), A's initial statement can be taken as indication that John is vegetarian, which is what the prejacent of ( 43)-B-(ii) says.…”

Deriving the evidence asymmetry in positive polar questions

“…Preposed negative questions (see among others Ladd 1981;Romero & Han 2004;Asher & Reese 2005;Reese 2007;AnderBois 2011;Gutzmann & Miró 2011;Krifka 2017, Dayal 2016ch. 9, Frana & Rawlins 2016Goodhue 2018Goodhue , 2022Gutzmann, Hartmann & Matthewson 2022), I will assume, are different beasts altogether:…”

PARAMETRIC DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ENGLISH AND KOREAN RESPONSE PARTICLES: A DISCOURSE‐BASED HPSG APPROACH1

“…The third question concerns the role of contextual bias. As pointed out by Ladd (1981), Sudo (2013), and Goodhue (2022), an NPQ like Isn't there a vegetarian restaurant around here? can carry different flavors of bias, yielding the difference in the scope of negation (outer negation or inner negation).…”