Interpreting high negation in Negative Interrogatives: the role of the Other

Pierre Larrivée; Alda Mari

doi:10.1515/lingvan-2020-0115

Article

Interpreting high negation in Negative Interrogatives: the role of the Other

Pierre Larrivée and Alda Mari

Published/Copyright: January 24, 2022

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From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 8 Issue s2

Abstract

This paper presents an account of the peculiar properties of Negative Interrogatives (NI). In uttering Don’t you speak Italian?, the speakers is biased towards the underlying positive proposition, expects a positive answer, and seeks a confirmation of that expectation from the hearer. What’s more, NI involves uncertainty with respect to p, a novel observation that we bring to the fore by comparison with epistemic modals. Using a framework by which speech-acts are derived by the two operators Speaker and Other representing sources of information, the high negative is assigned to the Other projection, the positive proposition being left under the responsibility of the Speaker. Thus, the NI is motivated by evidence contradicting the speaker’s belief, which is expressed by the negation that is attributed to another source and that therefore has full referential force. Because the questions is addressed by the Speaker in spite of evidence that ¬ p , NI displays uncertainty as to p and gives rise to a confirmation request. With direct mapping from syntax to semantics and pragmatics, the parsimonious account thus explains the morphosyntactic and interpretative properties of Negative Interrogatives.

Keywords: bias; epistemic modals; evidence; negation; questions

Corresponding author: Alda Mari, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS/ENS/EHESS/PSL, Paris, France, E-mail: alda.mari@ens.fr

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Received: 2020-11-03

Accepted: 2020-11-05

Published Online: 2022-01-24

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2020-0115

Keywords for this article

bias; epistemic modals; evidence; negation; questions