Aren't Prosody and Syntax Marking Bias in Questions?

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.