Expectation Biases and Context Management with Negative Polar Questions

This paper examines certain distinctive discourse properties of preposed negative yes/no questions (NPQs), like Isn’t Jane coming too?. Unlike other types of polar questions, NPQs ∼p? invariably convey a bias toward a particular answer, where the polarity of the bias is opposite of the polarity of the question: using an NPQ ∼p? necessarily expresses the speaker’s prior expectation that the positive answer p is correct. One prominent approach—what I call the context-management approach—attempts to capture the data regarding speaker expectation biases by treating NPQs fundamentally as epistemic questions about the proper discourse status of a proposition. I raise worries for existing accounts which challenge them to provide more adequate accounts of the posited operator’s specific context-managing content, its implementation in the discourse dynamics and compositional semantics, and its role in generating the observed patterns of speaker expectation biases. New data regarding discourse differences betweenNPQs and associated epistemicmodal questions are also introduced. I argue that we can capture the roles of NPQs in expressing speakers’ states ofmind andmanaging the discourse common ground without positing special context-managing operators or treating NPQs as fundamentally about the context. I follow Romero & Han in treating preposing negation as introducing an additional epistemic operator. However, I suggest that we treat this operator as a kind of conventionally “subjective” epistemic necessity operator, and assimilate the expressive/context-managing roles of NPQs to a more general kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. Drawing on independently motivated apparatus from the semantics/pragmatics of modals and a proposed general principle of Discourse Relevance, I show how we can capture NPQs’ distinctive expectation biases and discourse properties. The expressive/context-managing roles of NPQs can be derived from independently motivated features of their semantics and general principles of interpretation and conversation.