Article published In:
International Journal of Chinese LinguisticsVol. 7:1 (2020) ► pp.45–70
An analysis of focus and its role in the answering systems of polar questions in Chinese and English
Instead of classifying natural languages in terms of their answering systems for polar questions, this study
investigates how languages construct the answering system for the polar questions with a special concentration on the answering
system of the Chinese ma particle question and English polar questions. We argue that the primarily mechanism that natural
languages adopt to construct an answering system is the focus mechanism which is based on the relationship between a focus
sensitive marker and its association of focus. The different answering patterns to polar questions result from different scopes of
focus. In a polar question, what is being focused by the focus sensitive marker or focus operator falls into question scope (focus
association). The respondent answers the polar question based on the proposition in the question scope. Answering with a positive
particle expresses agreement with that question proposition while answering with a negative particle conveys that the question
proposition is not true.
Keywords: negative polar questions, ma particles, answering particles, focus, syntax
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The syntactic and semantic properties of the Chinese ma particle question
- 3.The literature review: Roelofsen and Farkas (2015)
- 4.The preliminary: Focus semantics (Rooth 1985, 1992)
- 5.Proposal: The focus mechanism in constructing answering patterns to polar questions
- 6.Answering patterns in Mandarin ma particle questions
- 7.Concluding remarks
- Notes
- Abbreviations used in this paper include
-
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