January 18, 2013: Satoshi Ito

Time:: 4:30pm, January 18, 2013
Place:: Keio University, Mita Campus,
South Annex, 7th floor
Speaker:: Satoshi Ito (Cornell University)
Title:: Negative Polar Questions in Japanese
Abstract:: I present data showing that two distinct intonation patterns in Japanese negative polar questions (NPQs) mark a pragmatic distinction parallel to Ladd’s (1981) distinction between inside negation and outside negation in English NPQs and tag questions. I show that the lexical accent of the negative suffix –nai ‘not’ is preserved in the pattern corresponding to Ladd’s “inside negation” (INPQ); –nai is deaccented in the “outside negation” (ONPQ) pattern. While the distinction between INPQs and ONPQs has been noted in recent work on Japanese (Sudo, to appear), this is the first research to relate the I/ONPQ distinction in Japanese specifically to prosody.

Semantics Research Group Meeting, January 18, 2013