New perspectives on bias in polar questions: a study of Hungarian

Beáta Gyuris  

Idõpont: 2014. március 27., 17.00

Speakers’ choice among positive and negative polar interrogatives and alternative questions is known to be highly constrained in a given context, in spite of the fact that they are assigned the same semantic interpretations (cf. Hamblin, 1973; Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1984). Most studies that are concerned with what preferences (biases) determine the choice between the above forms on a given occassion concentrate on only one source of bias.  

The first work looking at the simultaneous effects of two apparently independent types of biases is Sudo (2013), which provides a characterization of English and Japanese PPQs, as well as the outside and inside negation readings of their corresponding NPQs in terms of their evidential biases and epistemic biases.

The aim of this talk is to provide new insights into the analysis of bias in polar questions by showing that the distinction proposed by Sudo (2013) between evidential and epistemic biases can provide an integrated picture of the Hungarian system of polar interrogatives.

This perspective helps to explain restrictions on the occurrences of the different forms of polar interrogatives with respect to a large number of question uses in one dialect of Hungarian. We derive the biases associated with the individual constituents from different sources and sketch their impact in a formal model of dialogue.