Interpreting high negation in Negative Interrogatives: the role of the Other

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents an account of the peculiar properties of Negative Interrogatives (NI). In uttering Don’t you speak Italian?, the speakers is biased towards the underlying positive proposition, expects a positive answer, and seeks a confirmation of that expectation from the hearer. What’s more, NI involves uncertainty with respect to p, a novel observation that we bring to the fore by comparison with epistemic modals. Using a framework by which speech-acts are derived by the two operators Speaker and Other representing sources of information, the high negative is assigned to the Other projection, the positive proposition being left under the responsibility of the Speaker. Thus, the NI is motivated by evidence contradicting the speaker’s belief, which is expressed by the negation that is attributed to another source and that therefore has full referential force. Because the questions is addressed by the Speaker in spite of evidence that ¬ p ${\neg}p$ , NI displays uncertainty as to p and gives rise to a confirmation request. With direct mapping from syntax to semantics and pragmatics, the parsimonious account thus explains the morphosyntactic and interpretative properties of Negative Interrogatives.