Negated Polarity Questions as Denegations of Assertions

Abstract

The paper offers a new proposal for so-called high negation in questions like Isn’t there a vegetarian restaurant around here? It develops a theory of speech acts that allows for certain semantic operators, like negation, to scope over them. It is argued that high negation is negation over an assertion (here, ‘there is a vegetarian restaurant around here’), and that the question is a request by the speaker to refrain from asserting that proposition. In doing this, the speaker checks whether the addressee would exclude that there is a vegetarian restaurant around here. This rhetorical move is justified under certain circumstances, which explains the biases that have been observed with such questions, and also with questions with low negation such as Is there no vegetarian restaurant here? The paper also introduces a more fine-grained notion of polarity questions; in addition to the standardly assumed “bipolar” questions that present two propositions, one being the negation of the other, it also assumes “monopolar” questions that present just one proposition, and hence allow for the expression of a bias.