Responding to negative biased questions in Russian

Ljudmila Geist, Sophie Repp

Abstract:

The paper investigates polar responses to biased questions with outer vs. inner
negation and the particle razve ‘really’ in Russian. We present experimental evidence
from two acceptability judgement studies and show that the two question
types have slightly different answer patterns. We argue that the meaning previously
suggested for the particles da/net must be revised and put forth an analysis
of our results which combines a proposal for outer vs. inner negation in terms of
the illocutionary operator falsum vs. propositional negation (Repp 2006, 2009),
and a proposal for response particles in terms of propositional anaphors that realize
certain polarity features (Roelofsen & Farkas 2015). We argue that the set of
polarity features hitherto assumed should be extended to features that are sensitive
to the type of antecedent that polar responses react to: assertion or question.
Keywords: questions, question bias, negation, response particles, propositional
anaphors, acceptability jugments