Brian Reese

Negative polar interrogatives and bias

This paper develops a discourse based approach to negative polar interrogatives (nis). nis are subject to more contextual restrictions than their positive counterparts, a fact that has lead some researchers to assign the two types of question distinct denotations. I argue in favor of standard analyses of polar questions, on which positive and negative interrogatives are equivalent. I show a certain subclass of nis has a complex semantic type due in part to intonational cues and which constrains their contribtion to discourse logical form.