The prosody of enhanced bias in Mandarin and Japanese negative questions
Introduction
In Hamblin-style (1973) analysis of questions, a positive polar question and the corresponding negative polar question like (1) are predicted to have the same semantics, i.e., {p, ¬ p}.
However, the two questions in (1) have different meanings (Büring and Gunlogson, 2000). While (1-a) can be asked when the speaker has no bias, (1-b) should be used when the speaker has evidence against the proposition ‘there is a vegetarian restaurant around here’. Thus, Büring and Gunlogson (2000) claim that these questions have different felicity conditions; a negative polar question like (1-b) requires evidence against p.
Similarly, Romero and Han (2004) observe that a preposed negative polar question like (2-a) has a bias toward the positive answer compared to the non-preposed one (2-b).
Although how the biased meaning arises from a negative polar question is still controversial (Ladd, 1981, Büring and Gunlogson, 2000, Creswell, 2000, Romero and Han, 2004, Reese, 2006), there is a general consensus that the negative polar question induces a bias meaning. For instance, Romero and Han (2004) hypothesize that preposed negation in English introduces a verum operator that generates the bias meaning as an implicature. Deriving bias in negative questions is beyond the scope of the current study, which focuses on the semantics of the prosody that enhances this bias. However, we speculate that the Gricean Quantity Principle or the Principle of Economy may be at work. That is, if positive and negative questions have identical semantics, then uttering the (usually shorter) positive version is more economical. Thus, if the speaker decides to use the negative question, there must be an extra message that the speaker wants to convey above and beyond the plain question meaning.
This paper points out and analyzes previously unnoticed means of constraining the felicity of negative polar questions in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. In these two languages, the presence of an additional prosodic cue on a negative polar question requires a context where the speaker has stronger evidence that reinforces the bias, in contrast to questions without this additional cue. The paper first describes the relationship between the prosodic cues and the bias effects, and proposes our semantic analyses. We treat these prosodic cues as intonational features or morphemes that are paratactically associated to the sentence. That is, these prosodic features are not syntactically integrated in the structure; rather, they are floating morphemes that attach to sentences (Bartels, 1999). We then provide the lexical meanings that compositionally derive the desired interpretations of the negative polar questions, whereby information-seeking questions are turned into meta-discourse questions. Finally, we report two experiments which empirically support our observations and analyses.
This paper is structured as follows: In Section 2, we start with the basic observation and semantic analysis of Mandarin sentence-final stress. Section 3 deals with Japanese deaccentuation. Section 4 summarizes the introspection-based analyses of the two languages. In Sections 5 and 6, we report two experiments in which native speakers of Mandarin and Japanese judge the naturalness of the prosodic cues against contexts where the strength of the bias is manipulated. The results support the proposal that the addition of the prosodic cues requires a context where there is stronger evidence supporting the bias. Section 7 concludes the paper.
Section snippets
Mandarin sentence-final stress
This section presents introspection-based observations about the prosodic cues of enhanced bias in Mandarin Chinese. Prosodic stress that is normally placed on constituents to induce a focus interpretation can also appear in a sentence-final position. When sentence-final stress is used in a negative polar question, the question expresses that the speaker had a previous belief that the positive answer was true.
Introspection-based data
Next, we turn to the deaccentuation of adjectives in Japanese.3 In Japanese, rising negative questions like (13) express bias meanings which parallel English preposed negative questions (Romero and Han, 2004), or tag questions (Reese, 2007). That is, the
Interim summary
We have presented semantic analyses of the effects of the prosodic cues in biased negative polar questions in Mandarin and Japanese, based on native-speaker judgments. In both languages, the additional prosodic cue on a negative polar question requires a context where the speaker has new evidence which reinforces the bias. Representationally, both prosodic features are treated as floating morphemes which are paratactically associated to sentences. Semantically, the addition of a prosodic cue
Experiment I: Mandarin sentence-final stress
As discussed in Section 2, in Mandarin Chinese, having sentence-final stress indicates an epistemic conflict between the speaker's previous belief and the incoming proposition. Therefore, our proposal predicts that a sentence uttered with sentence-final stress is more natural in contexts where the speaker has sufficient evidence for the alternative proposition (and thus is strongly biased) than in contexts where the speaker is unbiased or weakly biased. The prediction is tested in Experiment I,
Experiment II: Japanese deaccentuation
In Experiment II, native speakers of Tokyo Japanese judged the naturalness of different combinations of accent pattern and evidentiality of the context. Section 3 described the deaccentuation of adjectives as a marker for strong evidentiality. It is predicted that deaccented adjectives are preferred when the context suggests that the speaker's bias for a positive answer is enhanced by newly acquired evidence.
Concluding remarks
We have investigated prosodic markers added to negative polar questions in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. In both cases, negative polar questions reflect the speaker's bias toward the positive answers. We first observed that having a prosodic cue on a negative polar question enhances the bias. We tested this observation by conducting naturalness rating experiments on Mandarin sentence-final stress and Japanese adjective deaccentuation. In both experiments, we found a significant interaction
Acknowledgments
The presented research is partly supported by City University of Hong Kong New Staff Start-up Grant (No. 7200192), CTL Small Scale Research Grant (CTL SSRG 2011-02), RGC Germany/HK Joint Research project 9053008 (G_HK009/10) and City University of Hong Kong Strategic Research Grant (No. 7002795). We would like to thank Yuki Hirose at University of Tokyo and our research assistants, Yuko Miura and Kenji Ogawara. We are also grateful to Miriam C. Nussbaum, Shinichiro Ishihara, Sarah Korostoff,
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