Differentiating between evidential bias and epistemic bias in questions: Evidence from Cantonese
Ka-Fai Yip
January 2025
 

This study argues that there are two sources of question bias: one from the speaker’s epistemic states, another one from contextual evidence available in the discourse. Crucial support is drawn from four Cantonese yes-no question particles, which encode question bias of a particular type: epistemic bias for maa3 (anti-biased/ neutral), ho2 (positive-biased), and me1 (negative-biased); and positive evidential bias for aa4, which is underspecified for epistemic bias. Epistemic bias is modeled as arising from public beliefs of the possible answers, whereas evidential bias is analyzed as a requirement of a set of propositions in the Common Ground that entails the weak necessity of the positive answer to the question. A parallel between rising declaratives in English and Cantonese aa4 is discussed, which also shows that evidential bias may be encoded either in the form of intonation or sentence-final particles.
I also propose that aa4’s apparent rhetorical use is a “higher-level” confirmational question on the addressee’s belief rather than on the proposition itself. Given contextual evidence of the addressee’s belief and the obvious falsity of the proposition, using aa4 triggers a conversational implicature of challenging the belief, leading to the rhetorical flavor. This account resolves some issues about yes-no rhetorical questions with negative answers, further strengthening the pragmatic approach to rhetorical questions.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/008751
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: submitted
keywords: yes-no questions, evidential bias, epistemic bias, rhetorical questions, higher-level confirmation, cantonese, semantics
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