Affirmative and rejective responses to negative assertions and questions
Final Report Abstract
Responses to negative utterances are notorious for producing misunderstandings. For instance, if the question Were you not at home? is answered by a simple No, it is quite unclear, whether the person answering was at home or not. The project investigated the meaning and use of different types of responses to negative statements and negative polar questions in English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Russian and German Sign Language, DGS. These response types included (i) response particles like yes and no, which are ambiguous after negative antecedents, (ii) response elements like correct, precisely or wrong, which are not ambiguous, and (iii) responses containing an anaphor, such as I think so, I don’t believe it or That would be weird. The methods we employed were quantitative elicitation in experiments, corpus analyses and qualitative interviews. The project showed that particles like yes and no are ambiguous across languages but that languages differ regarding the preferred interpretations of these particles. Furthermore, individual speakers differ in their preferences, which contributes to misunderstandings. Still, we also found that after negative utterances, speakers use unambiguous response elements more often than after positive utterances, which suggests that they try to avoid ambiguity. Other important results of the project are data which suggest a highly complex preference pattern for responses to negative questions. Such questions may express certain speaker expectations regarding the truth, which has repercussions for the use of response elements. Finally, responses containing an anaphor come in a variety of forms, whose selection depends both on intricate interactions between form and meaning. For all our findings, we provide theoretical analyses, which build on but also challenge previous research.
Publications
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Modal subordination of propositional anaphora: On the role of tense and the modal particle ook in contextual counterfactuals in Dutch. In R. et al. (eds.) Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21. 881-898
Meijer, A. Marlijn & Sophie Repp
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Responding to negative assertions in Germanic: On yes and no in English, Dutch and Swedish. In: M.Teresa Espinal et al. (eds.) Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23, Bd. 2. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès). 267–285
Repp, Sophie; A. Marlijn Meijer & Nathalie Scherf
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Affirming and rejecting assertions in German Sign Language (DGS). In: M. Franke et al. (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 24. Bd. 2. Osnabrück University & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 1–19
Loos, Cornelia; Markus Steinbach & Sophie Repp
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Propositional Anaphora: The Case of Embedded Polar Responses in Dutch and English. PhD thesis, Universität zu Köln
Meijer, Anna Marlijn
