Abstract
Past research has concentrated on the use of different forms of polar questions in specific contexts, defined in terms of the relationship between original bias and contextual evidence. It has been showed that, for English and German, people tend to prefer specific forms given the pragmatic context. Based on previous experiments, in this work, we observe that the same tendencies occur in Italian. Also, we adopt a more refined experimental setup with three different tasks and a more natural evaluation scale to better capture nuances in appropriateness evaluations, provided by human subjects, which therefore reflects the more realistic one-to-many relationship among forms and functions. In fact, the results show how specific forms of polar questions are especially typical of situations where the bias has the opposite value with respect to the evidence, i.e., in positive bias versus negative evidence, for which a high negative polar question in the past tense was more frequently selected by the subjects (Note 1).
Highlights
Questions are utterances that seek for verbal or other semiotic responses [Hayano, 2013, Sidnell and Stivers, 2012, 395]
According to the type of question content, polar, or alternative questions - these levels of analysis interconnect with each other to express specific functions, as it will be shown in this work as far as grammar and epistemic asymmetry are concerned
The Free Production (FP) task was aimed at collecting spontaneous productions from the participants
Summary
Questions are utterances that seek for verbal or other semiotic responses [Hayano, 2013, Sidnell and Stivers, 2012, 395]. They can lead to different interactional outcomes: i) imposing presuppositions, agendas, and preferences; ii) generating various actions that might be potentially face-threatening; iii) causing interlocutors to elaborate an answer [Brown and Levinson, 1978]. The relationship between the grammar and the epistemic asymmetry of polar questions (PQs) is, described, as this type of questions appears to be mostly preferred when Common Ground Inconsistencies occur. In English, for example, we can generally have the following classes:
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