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Aren't Prosody and Syntax Marking Bias in Questions?

Anja Arnhold1,2, Bettina Braun, Maribel Romero2

  • 1University of Alberta, Canada.

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Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

English and German speakers use different strategies to disambiguate polar questions. English relies on intonation, while German uses morphosyntax to indicate which proposition is being questioned.

Keywords:
Ladd’s ambiguityYes-no questionbiasspeaker certainty

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Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Semantics

Background:

  • English polar questions with high negation exhibit ambiguity, serving to confirm the speaker's belief (p) or the addressee's disbelief (¬p).
  • This ambiguity is potentially resolved through prosodic cues, a phenomenon explored in prior linguistic research.
  • German, unlike English, possesses morphosyntactic markers to distinguish between these two types of polar questions.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the hypothesized prosodic disambiguation of English polar questions with high negation.
  • To test the hypothesis that German lacks this prosodic disambiguation due to its morphosyntactic marking system.
  • To compare the strategies employed by English and German speakers in conveying the intended proposition of polar questions.

Main Methods:

  • A production study involving 24 native speakers of Western Canadian English and 24 native speakers of German.
  • Analysis of 764 English and 767 German utterances to identify prosodic and morphosyntactic disambiguation strategies.
  • Controlled manipulation of speaker certainty regarding the proposition being questioned.

Main Results:

  • English speakers, when faced with a belief conflict (speaker believes p, addressee implies ¬p), preferred high negation questions and used intonation to signal the checked proposition.
  • German speakers predominantly used morphosyntax: high negation questions for their own belief (p) and low negation questions for the addressee's belief (¬p).
  • Prosodic patterns in German were largely dictated by the chosen morphosyntactic form, and speaker certainty did not significantly influence the marking strategy.

Conclusions:

  • English employs prosody (intonation) to disambiguate the intended proposition in polar questions with high negation.
  • German utilizes morphosyntactic variations (high vs. low negation) to differentiate between speaker- and addressee-oriented propositions.
  • The findings support the hypothesis that prosodic disambiguation is absent in German, replaced by distinct morphosyntactic strategies.