Negative Interrogatives and Whatnot

On two varieties of negative polar interrogatives in Japanese

2. Three interpretations of negative polar interrogatives • Ladd (1981) distinguishes two varieties of negative polar interrogatives, which are epistemically biased toward the opposite directions. o the “outside NEG” question: conveys a positive bias; “the speaker believes a proposition P and wants confirmation” o the “inside NEG” question: conveys a negative bias; “the speaker has just inferre...

Interrogatives and Adverbs of Quantification

Interrogatives and Adverbs of Quantiication

On the semantics and logic of declaratives and interrogatives

In many natural languages, there are clear syntactic and/or intonational differences between declarative sentences, which are primarily used to provide information, and interrogative sentences, which are primarily used to request information. Most logical frameworks restrict their attention to the former. Those that are concerned with both usually assume a logical language that makes a clear sy...

The Force of Negation in Wh Exclamatives and Interrogatives ∗

One could assume that the negative morpheme no in (2) is not semantically negative, but this would be dissatisfying in several respects. First of all, in general we of course would prefer not to postulate an ambiguity, on fear of missing a generalization. Second, the question arises of why it is the negative morpheme which takes on the pleonastic function, if the meaning of this item is not imp...