Lecture
Projected common ground and question bias: High negation polar questions in Mandarin
- Date
- Friday 11 July 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.04
Abstract
Previous studies have widely observed that bushi…ma questions in Mandarin Chinese exhibit a strong positive epistemic bias and have classified them as rhetorical questions. Yet, their syntax and semantics remain underexplored. This talk presents three main claims: (i) bushi functions as high negation in the CP domain; (ii) bushi…ma questions have a broader contextual distribution than English high negation questions; and (iii) this distribution can be explained by combining a semantics of high negation with pragmatic reasoning (cf. Romero and Han 2004; Krifka 2017). Specifically, bushi (i) presupposes that the prejacent is in the projected common ground, giving rise to the strong positive bias of bushi…ma questions, and (ii) asserts that the prejacent is not in the projected common ground; as a result, bushi…ma questions are licensed in contexts involving the addressee’s potential disbelief, rejection, or lack of awareness.
You can also join the talk online.
Watch now!