Interpreting high negation in Negative Interrogatives: the role of the Other - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Linguistics Vanguard : a Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences Année : 2022

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

Alda Mari

Résumé

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 ${\neg}p$ , 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.

Domaines

Linguistique
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
Interro_Neg (25) (1).pdf (255.45 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)

Dates et versions

hal-03898338 , version 1 (14-12-2022)

Identifiants

Citer

Pierre Larrivée, Alda Mari. Interpreting high negation in Negative Interrogatives: the role of the Other. Linguistics Vanguard : a Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences, 2022, 8 (s2), pp.219-226. ⟨10.1515/lingvan-2020-0115⟩. ⟨hal-03898338⟩
13 Consultations
72 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More