Dr. Shumian Ye, Peking-Universität (invited speaker)
Zeit: Freitag, 12. Juni 2026, 15:45 Uhr
Ort: Alte Aula, Münzgasse 30, 72070 Tübingen
Titel: Projected common ground and high negation polar questions in Mandarin Chinese
Abstract:
In English, high negation polar questions such as Doesn’t he like basketball? have been reported to carry a strong positive epistemic bias, i.e., the speaker previously believed that the positive answer is true (Ladd 1981; Han 1998; Büring and Gunlogson 2000). This talk develops a semantic analysis of Mandarin high negation polar questions such as (1). I argue that these questions have a broader contextual distribution than their English counterparts, and that this distribution can be explained by combining a semantics of high negation with pragmatic reasoning about the projected common ground (cf. Romero and Han 2004; Krifka 2017).
(1) ta bushi xihuan lanqiu ma?
he bushi like basketball Q
‘Doesn’t he like basketball?’
More specifically, high negation bushi, like propositional negation, has both a positive presuppositional component and a negative assertive component, but these components target the discourse status of the prejacent. It presupposes that the prejacent is in the projected common ground, rather than merely that the speaker believed it to be true, and asserts that the prejacent is not in the projected common ground. On this analysis, bushi…ma questions are licensed when the speaker takes the prejacent to be commonly known or generally accepted, but encounters contextual resistance, for instance when the addressee may fail to believe, accept, or be aware of the information expressed by the prejacent.
