Biased Questions
Daniel Goodhue
September 2024 

A draft of a chapter in which I summarize much of what I know about biased questions. Highlights include: a treatment of Pelosi's subtle insistence that Biden should end his campaign as a biased "question", an argument that there is no strong evidence for the existence of inner negation in high negation questions, a demonstration based on rising declaratives that speech acts are not (always) specified by grammar, and finally an argument that it is impossible to produce a certain kind of compositional theory of tag questions. Here is the more formal abstract: I begin by characterizing the two main kinds of bias in polar questions, \textit{speaker bias} and \textit{evidential bias}. Then I pursue four goals. The first is to introduce the basics of each of the biased question phenomena that have generated the most interest in the literature to date, including high negation questions, low negation questions, polarity/verum focus questions, questions with \textit{even}, outer vs. inner negation, declarative questions, and tag questions. The second is to do this in a way that is comprehensible to interested readers who do not yet have deep familiarity with formal semantics and pragmatics. Third, beyond the basics, I aim to give readers a glimpse of compelling issues at the empirical and theoretical cutting edge. Finally, I hope to leave readers with an array of launch pads for future research.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008450 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	bias, high negation questions, low negation questions, inner negation, outer negation, verum focus, polarity focus, rising declarative questions, tag questions, falling declarative questions, speaker bias, evidential bias, speech act operators, semantics, syntax, phonology
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