Polarity Reversal Questions and the Semantics of Prosodic Incorporation
Tom Roberts, Deniz Rudin
January 2024 

English polarity reversal questions (PRQs, e.g. "Gertrude mowed the lawn, didn’t she?") comprise individual biased questions despite the fact they consist of two apparently independent clauses, which, if uttered as two prosodically distinct sentences ("Gertrude mowed the lawn. Didn’t she?") give instead the sense that the speaker is backtracking on their claim. Many recent accounts stipulate the special discourse effects of PRQs into their context update potential at the level of a construction (Malamud and Stephenson, 2015; Farkas and Roelofsen, 2017; Bill and Koev, 2023: a.o.). We propose that the range of interpretations of PRQs, and their difference from string-identical sequences of two sentences, can be attributed to the fact that PRQs are prosodically integrated, packaging two syntactically independent clauses into a single Intonational Phrase and thus a single context update. We argue that this assumption, combined with a vanilla treatment of the discourse effects of uttering declarative and interrogative clauses, can derive the interpretations of PRQs, explain important limitations on their form, and account for their differences from non-integrated sequences, without relying on construction-specific stipulations.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007859 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 28
keywords:	tag questions, polarity reversal questions, context update, prosody, semantics-pragmatics interface, table model, semantics
Downloaded:	163 times

 

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