Abstract
Among languages that employ specialized particles for answering polar questions, two major groups are known: Positive-Negative (P-N) and Agreement-Disagreement (A-D). English and Italian are examples of the former group, Japanese an example of the latter. It has occasionally been remarked in the literature that at least in some P-N languages a narrow focus in a negative polar question affects the choice of responding particles: namely, the answering pattern shifts to A-D. In the present contribution, this claim is thoroughly tested experimentally with two forced choice experiments that investigate the choice of responding particles in answers to Italian negative polar questions both with and without narrow foci. Our results bring clear support to the claim of the exceptional answering pattern to negative polar questions with narrow foci. Two candidate accounts are presented, in accord with the two main current lines of research on responding particles: an ellipsis account and an anaphoric account. In both cases, we will argue that a crucial role is played by the interaction of the narrow focus with sentential negation in the questions.
Highlights
Among languages that employ specialized particles for answering polar questions, two major groups are known: Positive-Negative (P-N) and Agreement-Disagreement (A-D)
English and Italian are examples of the former group, Japanese an example of the latter. It has occasionally been remarked in the literature that at least in some P-N languages a narrow focus in a negative polar question affects the choice of responding particles: namely, the answering pattern shifts to A-D
Absolute and relative polarity can be regarded as two binary features that combine into four combinations, which we will indicate as Positive Agreement (PA), Negative Disagreement (ND), Negative Agreement (NA) and Positive Disagreement (PD)
Summary
Natural languages display an array of grammatical strategies to answer polar questions. The authors investigate the basic pattern of responses (replies and answers) in Italian They devised two tasks to elicit responses to negative statements and questions (the positive counterparts were not considered): first, a biographical interview on a given topic of interest (namely, foreign language training); second, a Map Task, in which the subject (Giver) is given a map marked with a route and has to answer questions posed by the experimenter (Follower) who has been given an unmarked copy of the map. As is common in languages without a particle specialized for PD, in the overwhelming majority of PD responses the particles are followed by a sentence (i.e., the markedness of positive disagreement is reflected by longer and more explicit responses)
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