Decomposing cornering effects: an experimental study
- Alternative Questions with "or not" (NAQ) convey a cornering effect, which is not found with they polar counterparts (PQ). This effect has been claimed to consist of two parts (Biezma 2009): NAQs (i) cannot be used discourse-initially and (ii) they do not license followup questions/subquestions. In this paper, we ask the following: Are both parts of cornering linked to the same property of NAQs? Or do they reflect distinct linguistic phenomena? We explore the issue by comparing the behavior of NAQs to Complement Alternative Questions (CAQ), a type of question that, like NAQs, presents logically opposite alternatives but, unlike NAQs, fully spells out the second one. Results from two experiments suggest that both parts of cornering can instead be explained in terms of independent semantic and pragmatic principles, which operate beyond the domain of alternative questions.
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| Author: | Andrea Beltrama, Erlinde Meertens, Maribel Romero |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-558076 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.60.2018.461 |
| ISSN: | 1435-9588 |
| ISSN: | 0947-7055 |
| Parent Title (German): | Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, Vol. 1 / eds. Uli Sauerland and Stephanie Solt. Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft: ZAS papers in linguistics ; Nr. 60 |
| Publisher: | Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) |
| Place of publication: | Berlin |
| Document Type: | Part of a Book |
| Language: | English |
| Year of Completion: | 2020 |
| Year of first Publication: | 2018 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2020/09/11 |
| Tag: | alternative questions; cornering; discourse; focus; information structure |
| Page Number: | 16 |
| First Page: | 175 |
| Last Page: | 190 |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 470273879 |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache |
| 4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik | |
| Sammlungen: | Linguistik |
| Linguistik-Klassifikation: | Linguistik-Klassifikation: Semantik / Semantics |
| Zeitschriften / Jahresberichte: | ZAS papers in linguistics : ZASPiL / ZASPiL 60 = Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, Vol. 1 |
| : | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-559256 |
| Licence (German): |  Creative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0 |
