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Intonation, <i>yes</i> and <i>no</i>

Paper · 2018 · Daniel Goodhue and Michael Wagner

Summary

In English, yes and no can swap roles when someone responds to a negative question such as "Is Jane not coming?": either particle can confirm or deny. After a positive question they cannot. The authors review four theories of this "interchangeability": Kramer & Rawlins 2009, Krifka 2013, Roelofsen & Farkas 2015 and Holmberg 2016. They argue that each theory captures something real, so a synthesis may be needed. They then test three questions experimentally:

  • Does intonation on the particles track whether the answer is positive or negative?
  • Which particles do speakers prefer, and when?
  • Do those preferences depend on the polarity of earlier sentences in the context?

Production studies used scripted dialogues with polar questions and rising declaratives. A perception study varied the intonation of bare particles, and a reading study adapted Meijer et al. (2015) to English. The main finding is that speakers often put the contradiction contour (Liberman & Sag 1974) on positive, disagreeing replies to negative questions. This tune strongly changes how listeners interpret a bare yes or no. Particle preferences did not seem to depend on the polarity of the preceding context. The upshot is that theories of polar particles must account for prosody.

Key points

  • The paper studies only low-negation questions ("Is Jane not coming?"). High-negation questions ("Isn't Jane coming?") behave like positive ones in American English, and an item-by-item analysis showed participants never read the test items as high negation.
  • Earlier findings it builds on:
    • Brasoveanu et al. (2013): no is preferred over yes for agreeing with a negative declarative.
    • Kramer & Rawlins (2012): bare particles lean toward the negative answer.
    • The authors' own felicity ratings partly replicate these results.
  • New experimental comparisons, never tested before:
    • replies to polar questions vs. rising declaratives;
    • yes vs. yeah.
  • Main results:
    • The contradiction contour (CC) appeared mainly on positive responses, whether the question was positive or negative.
    • Rise-fall intonation was spread fairly evenly across conditions.
    • The perception study compared only CC against falling intonation.
  • Resources and venue: audio files of the key examples are released (DOI 10.5334/gjgl.210.s1) for inspection in Praat. The article appeared in Glossa 3(1), 2018, 45 pages.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Krifka treats a negative clause as offering two propositional antecedents, one for the inner positive clause (TP) and one for the negated clause (NegP), with yes asserting and no negating whichever is picked up; this explains why the particles become ambiguous only after negation.
  • I2. A negative question is only appropriate when the context offers evidence for the negative answer, so a positive reply amounts to disagreeing with that evidence, not just supplying information.
  • I3. The authors tell apart high negation (negation attached to the auxiliary) and low negation (after the subject) because the two behave differently with answer particles.
  • I4. In text there is no contradiction contour, so a bare particle replying to a negative question is ambiguous, and readers tend to default to the negative reading.
  • I5. The reading study flips only the polarity of the preceding context to test whether particle preferences depend on it, a clean minimal-pair design. Checking item by item for unintended readings complements it.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): when a negative polar question is processed, keep both the positive and the negated proposition as candidate referents, and resolve a following bare yes/no against them rather than against a single proposition.
  • I2 (world): store the evidence state behind a negative question in the world model, so a later positive reply is recorded as contradicting that evidence.
  • I3 (tree): flag in the UD tree whether negation is fused with a fronted auxiliary or follows the subject, and pass that flag on so pragmatics treats the two question types differently.
  • I4 (answer): when Mova reads a bare yes/no reply to a negative question, mark the interpretation as uncertain unless a following clause ("she is") settles it; when producing answers, always add the clause.
  • I5 (learn): build minimal-pair evaluation sets that change only context polarity, as a negative control showing whether learned particle resolution relies on irrelevant context cues.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓McGill UniversityMontreal · Canada51 works · 10,476 citations

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 463 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksSpeech & spoken language · 233 works

Cite

Cite as Daniel Goodhue and Michael Wagner. 2018. Intonation, <i>yes</i> and <i>no</i>. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.210

@article{goodhue2018intonation,
  title = {{Intonation, <i>yes</i> and <i>no</i>}},
  author = {Daniel Goodhue and Michael Wagner},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.210},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.210}
}

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  51. How to cite this article: Goodhue, Daniel and Michael Wagner. 2018. Intonation, yes and no. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3(1): 5. 1–45, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.210 ↗
  52. Published: 10 January 2018 find
  53. Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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