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The Grammatical Realization of Polarity Contrast: Theoretical, empirical, and typological approaches
Edited by Christine Dimroth and Stefan Sudhoff
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 249] 2018
► pp. 129–172

Biased declarative questions in Swedish and German

Negation meets modal particles (νäl and doch wohl)

| Humboldt University Berlin
| University of Cologne

This paper investigates a class of biased questions with declarative syntax in Swedish and German that differ in their bias from the familiar class of declarative questions: rejecting questions (RQs), which may occur with or without negation. We provide a semantic-pragmatic analysis of RQs and show for negative RQs that the negation is non-propositional. We analyze the non-propositional negation as the speech-act modifying operator falsum (Repp 2009a, 2013). In both languages, falsum interacts with modal particles whose meanings relate to contrast and the epistemic state of the speaker. We propose that the illocutionary operator in RQs is rejectq, which is an operator that comes with presuppositions that are the source of the particular bias of RQs.

Keywords: non-propositional negation, question bias, modal particles, illocutionary operator, negative polarity item
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Question bias
  • 3.Bias in rejecting questions
  • 4.Rejecting questions in German
    • 4.1The meaning of the modal particles doch and wohl in isolation
    • 4.2Combining doch and wohl
    • 4.3Proposal for German rejecting questions
  • 5.Rejecting questions in Swedish
    • 5.1Fronted negation
    • 5.2The modal particle νäl
    • 5.3Combining fronted negation and modal particles
    • 5.4Experiment on the interaction of negation and the modal particle väl in Swedish negative rejecting questions
      • 5.4.1Method
      • 5.4.2Results
      • 5.4.3Discussion
  • 6.Proposal
    • 6.1Polarity-sensitive items in rejecting questions: Evidence for non-propositional negation
    • 6.2 rejectq and falsum: Illocutionary operators in rejection questions
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.249.05see
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