Semantics Research Group Meeting, March 17, 2017

It has been observed in the literature (Ladd 1981, Buring & Gunlogson 2000, Romero & Han 2004, Ito & Oshima 2014 among others) that the speaker's epistemic bias conveyed through a negative polar question (NPQ) can be either positive or negative toward a specific answer.

In this talk, I discuss the prosodic status of what Ito & Oshima call P-type NPQs (Japanese NPQs which convey the speaker's positive epistemic bias). While Ito & Oshima argue that the prosodic pattern of P-type NPQs involves so-called "post-focus reduction", Ito (2015) argues "deaccenting" of the negative morpheme causes the prosodic pattern. Which of these two different phonetic phenomena is relevant with P-type NPQs? I show the data which indicate P-type NPQs employ "deaccenting" in some cases and "post-focus reduction" in others. Comparing with Korean data, I argue that "phrasing" is the key for NPQs to convey the speaker's positive epistemic bias.