Abstract
Alternative Questions with “or not” (NAQ) convey a cornering effect, which is notfound 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 followupquestions/subquestions. In this paper, we ask the following: Are both parts of corneringlinked to the same property of NAQs? Or do they reflect distinct linguistic phenomena? Weexplore 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, unlikeNAQs, fully spells out the second one. Results from two experiments suggest that both parts ofcornering can instead be explained in terms of independent semantic and pragmatic principles,which operate beyond the domain of alternative questions.Keywords: Alternative Questions, cornering, discourse, focus, information structure.
Highlights
Questions with seemingly similar semantic content have significantly different pragmatic properties
One possibility is that cornering is driven by certain distinctive properties of NAQs, as suggested by two separate accounts in the literature; the other possibility is that cornering is driven by more general pragmatic principles underlying information structure and discourse, which apply beyond NAQs
When the question was asked for the first time, Complement Alternative Questions (CAQ) were rated higher than NAQs (β =2.01, SE= 0.28, p
Summary
Questions with seemingly similar semantic content have significantly different pragmatic properties. Dinner is tomorrow and you need to know what is happening with the pasta It follows from these restrictions that NAQS are only felicitous in a context in which a question has already been asked before, and no other question follows it. Note that in this exchange a PQ is used discourse initially, and is followed by another question; this shows that neither component of cornering applies to it. Based on the results from our studies, we will suggest that Part 1 of cornering is linked to a particular focus structure which penalizes discourse-initial uses of questions in general; and that Part 2 is driven by a broader pragmatic principle that penalizes reusing a question that didn’t previously work. The emerging picture is one in which each part of cornering is derived independently, and can be derived through constraints that apply beyond the narrow domain of NAQ
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