Yes/no questions with negation: Towards integrating semantics and pragmatics

Abstract

Yes/no questions with negation show that pragmatic considerations enter in the analysis of linguistic form: the negation marker in sentences like “Don't you appreciate computational linguistics?” cannot be interpreted in terms of a logical operator. Rather, it indicates the speaker's bias towards a positive or negative answer to the positive form of the question. German has a special particle “doch” instead of the usual agreeing “ja” for an unexpected positive answer.

We propose a treatment within the constraint-based approach developed by Fenstad et al. (1987). They suggest to gather information from various linguistic levels in a common “constraint pool”. Our contribution concerns a pragmatic level.

Taking the formalism of LFG (Bresnan 1982) as our basis, we sketch for a tiny fragment of German yes/no questions with negation how the interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics is feasible within a single framework and that the different levels can still be treated separately.