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Polarity particle responses as a window onto the interpretation of questions and assertions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2026
Extract
This article provides an account of the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles in responses, starting with yes and no in English, and then extending the coverage to their crosslinguistic kin. Polarity particles are used in responses to both declarative and interrogative sentences, and thus provide a window onto the semantics and discourse effects of such sentences. We argue that understanding the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles requires a characterization of declaratives and interrogatives that captures a series of challenging similarities and differences across these two sentence types. To meet this challenge we combine and extend insights from inquisitive semantics, dynamic semantics, and commitment-based models of discourse. We then provide a full account of the English data that leads to a typology of polarity particles and a series of crosslinguistic predictions. These predictions are checked against data from Romanian, Hungarian, French, and German, languages that contrast with English in that they have ternary polarity particle systems, and contrast with one another in further subtle ways.
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- Copyright © 2015 Linguistic Society of America
Footnotes
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Parts of this article were presented in preliminary form at a Linguistics Colloquium at Stanford University in December 2011, the Amsterdam Colloquium in December 2011, Linguistics Colloquia at Yale University and Nijmegen University in April 2012, a workshop on polarity particle responses at Newcastle University in June 2012, and a course at the European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI) at the University of Düsseldorf in August 2013. We are grateful to the audiences at these events for very useful feedback and discussion. We are especially grateful to Scott AnderBois, Adrian Brasoveanu, Ivano Ciardelli, Sam van Gool, Jeroen Groenendijk, Klaus von Heusinger, Hans Kamp, Manfred Krifka, Oliver Northrup, Edgar Onea, Kathryn Pruitt, Arndt Riester, Tania Rojas-Esponda, and Matthijs Westera for extensive discussion of the ideas presented here and closely related topics. Finally, we are greatly indebted to Language editor Greg Carlson and two anonymous referees for extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of the article. Floris Roelofsen gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
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