Abstract
AbstractAcross languages, polarity particles like yes and no can be used as a response to the polar (yes/no) question. This paper offers a discourse‐based account for the distribution and interpretation of response particles in languages like English and Korean. The paper supports the view that response particles are anaphoric in nature and their interpretation is determined by the salient antecedent evoked by the context in question. The paper also suggests that the parametric differences between English‐style polarity‐based and Korean‐style truth‐based answering systems have to do with tight interactions between the anaphoric nature of response particles and discourse structure, rather than with the position of negation in syntactic structures. This direction, formalized in the framework of HPSG, offers a simpler account for the parametric differences between the two different answering systems as well as other related puzzles concerning variations in contextual bias.
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