Forthcoming: Biased questions: Experimental results and theoretical modelling

Tue Trinh (ed), Anton Benz (ed), Daniel Goodhue (ed), Kazuko Yatsushiro (ed), Manfred Krifka (ed)

Synopsis

Asking a question means, essentially, presenting the hearer with a set of propositions with the request that she choose from it those that are true. It is a well-known fact about natural language that questions can be "biased": the propositions presented are not all equal, so to speak. For example, the speaker's belief, or contextual evidence, might favor some against others. The formal means employed by grammar to express such biases have been of interest to linguists for a long time, and the investigation is still on-going. The contributions in this volume all pertain to biased questions. They grew out of talks presented at the workshop Biased Questions: Experimental Results and Theoretical Modelling, which took place at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft as part of the ERC project Speech Acts in Grammar and Discourse (SPAGAD). The papers are written by mostly senior researchers of different expertise who have previously published on the same topic, and explore this fascinating linguistic phenomenon from a variety of theoretical angles: pragmatics, semantics, syntax, phonology, psychology, and acquisition. The languages under discussion include Chinese, English, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, and Vietnamese. The collection provides the reader with a rich set of data and several open issues for future research.

Chapters

  • Introduction
    Anton Benz, Daniel Goodhue, Manfred Krifka, Tue Trinh, Kazuko Yatsushiro
  • Modalization and bias in questions
    Anastasia Giannakidou, Alda Mari
  • Marking the type of speaker bias
    Hungarian nem-e interrogatives
    Beáta Gyuris
  • The contribution of intonation in the conveyance of question bias
    Riccardo Orrico, Cristel Portes, Mariapaola D'Imperio
  • Negative polar questions in Russian
    Question bias and question concern
    Sophie Repp, Ljudmila Geist
  • Bias in tag questions
    Cory Bill, Todor Koev
  • Contextual bias and the landscape of Mandarin polar questions
    Yurie Hara, Mengxi Yuan
  • What can Cantonese sentence-final particles tell us about rhetorical questions?
    Angelika Kiss, Roger Yu-Hsiang Lo, Justin R. Leung
  • A note on bias and polarity in Vietnamese
    Tue Trinh
  • Psycholinguistic processing tasks and the study of question bias
    E Jamieson, Vinicius Macuch Silva
  • Evidential bias across clause types
    Beste Kamali
  • Children's acquisition of English "high" negation
    A window into the logic and composition of bias in questions
    Rebecca Woods, Tom Roeper
  • Everything that rises must converge
    Toward a unified account of inquisitive and assertive rising declaratives
    Daniel Goodhue
book cover

Published

February 18, 2025
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Topics at the Grammar-Discourse Interface

Print ISSN

2567-3335
Cite as
Trinh, Tue, Benz, Anton, Goodhue, Daniel, Yatsushiro, Kazuko & Krifka, Manfred (eds.). Forthcoming. Biased questions: Experimental results and theoretical modelling. (Topics at the Grammar-Discourse Interface). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tue Trinh, Anton Benz, Daniel Goodhue, Kazuko Yatsushiro, Manfred Krifka; Anastasia Giannakidou, Alda Mari, Beáta Gyuris, Riccardo Orrico, Cristel Portes, Mariapaola D'Imperio, Sophie Repp, Ljudmila Geist, Cory Bill, Todor Koev, Yurie Hara, Mengxi Yuan, Angelika Kiss, Roger Yu-Hsiang Lo, Justin R. Leung, E Jamieson, Vinicius Macuch Silva, Beste Kamali, Rebecca Woods, Tom Roeper

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.