The syntax and semantics of negative questions and answers in Korean and English

Authors

  • Keunhyung Park University of South Carolina
  • Stanley Dubinsky University of South Carolina

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v4i1.4518

Keywords:

semantics, Korean, English, negative polarity questions, proposition external negation (PEN), proposition internal negation (PIN)

Abstract

Differences in Korean and English negative polarity questions (NPQs) are revealed by the interpretation of simple yes-no answers to them. Yes-no answers to NPQs have seemingly unpredictable interpretations (Claus et al. 2017, Holmberg 2013, Kim 2017, Krifka 2017, Kramer & Rawlins 2009, Ladd 1981, Sudo 2013). However, one clearly observable fact is that yes-no answers to English and Korean NPQs can have opposite interpretations. This study: (i) compares the interpretation of positive and negative polarity questions (PPQs and NPQs) in English and Korean; (ii) examines the structure of negation in each language and its interaction with NPQs; and (iii) reports on an online experiment which gathered native speaker interpretations of NPQs in each language under context-free conditions.

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Published

2019-03-15

Issue

Vol. 4 (2019): Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America

Section

Articles

License

Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.

How to Cite

Park, Keunhyung, and Stanley Dubinsky. 2019. “The Syntax and Semantics of Negative Questions and Answers in Korean and English”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 4 (1): 19:1–9. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v4i1.4518.