Negated Polarity Questions as Denegations of Assertions

Abstract

The paper offers a new proposal for so-called high negation in questions like Isn’t there a vegetarian restaurant around here? It develops a theory of speech acts that allows for certain semantic operators, like negation, to scope over them. It is argued that high negation is negation over an assertion (here, ‘there is a vegetarian restaurant around here’), and that the question is a request by the speaker to refrain from asserting that proposition. In doing this, the speaker checks whether the addressee would exclude that there is a vegetarian restaurant around here. This rhetorical move is justified under certain circumstances, which explains the biases that have been observed with such questions, and also with questions with low negation such as Is there no vegetarian restaurant here? The paper also introduces a more fine-grained notion of polarity questions; in addition to the standardly assumed “bipolar” questions that present two propositions, one being the negation of the other, it also assumes “monopolar” questions that present just one proposition, and hence allow for the expression of a bias.

Precursors of this paper were presented at the 18th Amsterdam Colloquium 2011, at the University of Wuppertal, at ZAS Berlin, at the University of Frankfurt/Main in 2012 (Network meeting “Questions in Discourse”), and at Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT22) in Chicago. I gratefully acknowledge support by the DFG (SFB 632 “Information Structure”) and by the Bundesministerium für Bildung and Forschung (Förderkennzeichen 01UG0711; responsibility for the content of this publication remain with the author). Readers should be aware of my later paper, Krifka (2015), that develops a different take on high negation questions within the general overall framework. Specific thanks to inspiring discussions with colleagues at the occasion of these presentations, in particular David Beaver, Manfred Bierwisch, Andreas Haida, Joachim Jacobs, Horst Lohnstein, Sophie Repp, Uli Sauerland, Rob van der Sandt, Paul Portner, Tue Trinh, Hubert Truckenbrodt, Susanne Uhmann, Henk Zeevat, Malte Zimmermann, and Ede Zimmermann.

I dedicate this paper to the memory of Susanne Anschütz, the resourceful guardian of linguistics in Germany at the DFG, who passed away in February 2012.