by | February 4, 2025 · 12:39 pm

This is a blog post about yes-no questions?

Have you ever played that game 20 questions? You have to discover what someone is thinking of, and you’re only allowed to ask them questions that can be answered with ‘yes’ or ‘no’. So, you can’t ask ‘Where do they live?’ (answer: New Zealand), but you can ask ‘Do they live in New Zealand?’ (answer: yes). (I was thinking of a kiwi. The bird, not the fruit.)

Knowing which questions can be answered with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is easy, right? But have you ever noticed how many different ways there are to ask them? How do these sound:

Don’t they live in New Zealand?
Do they not live in New Zealand?
DO they live in New Zealand?
They live in New Zealand?
They live in New Zealand, don’t they?
They live in New Zealand, do they?
Do they live in New Zealand or not?

All of these would sound weird in the 20 questions game, but they make sense in certain situations. Here are scenarios for each of them:

A: I’m going to Australia. Hope I see some kiwis there.
B: Wait, don’t they live in New Zealand?

A: I wanted to see some kiwis on my trip, but I guess I won’t, because I’m only going to New Zealand.
B: Oh, do they not live in New Zealand?

A: I’m so glad I’m going to New Zealand because kangaroos live there and I might see one.
B: DO they live in New Zealand, though?

A: Guess what I saw on my trip to New Zealand – a kangaroo!
B: They live in New Zealand??

A: I need help with my project. What do you know about kiwis?
B: They live in New Zealand, don’t they?

A: Look at my project about kiwis. I put in a map of their homeland.
B: Oh, they live in New Zealand, do they?

B: Do kiwis live in New Zealand?
A: That’s for me to know and you to find out.
B: Quit being annoying, my project is overdue. Do they live in New Zealand or not?

If you think about it, it’s fascinating that as a speaker of English you understand the subtle differences between all these ways of asking the question. You can even infer things about the prior knowledge or expectations of the questioners. Yet your parents or teachers never explicitly taught you this. It’s part of your unconscious, complex knowledge of semantics and pragmatics.

Another interesting thing is that question-types similar to these show up in many other languages (languages are surprisingly the same!) – but they can be constructed in partly different ways (languages are surprisingly different!). Perhaps there will be a blog post about that one day.

Until then, here are a few things not to do:

– Hire a skywriter to ask your beloved, ‘You will marry me?’
– Ask a job applicant, ‘You’ve had a criminal conviction, haven’t you?’
– Greet your landlord with, ‘Can I pay the rent late or not?’

-by Lisa Matthewson

Kiwi photo by Judi Lapsley Miller – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71597120

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by | January 24, 2025 · 11:33 am

How is this a blog post?

Let’s say you’ve asked the question that constitutes the title of this post. It would be weird and at best a joke for us to respond ‘clearly’ or ‘definitely’ or ‘actually’, because that’s not what you’ve asked us. That’s surprising. Much of the time, how questions can be answered with adverbs like these. How did Floyd leave? Quietly. How did Clyde react? Indignantly. How will he respond? Judiciously.
 
But that’s not the only thing how questions can do. They can also ask for general descriptions. How do you like this paragraph? And the previous one? How was it? These can’t easily be answered with just an adverb. More natural answers describe general properties. You might say that this paragraph was useful, but the previous one sadly disappointing. These aren’t simple adverb answers. Yet this too is not the effect of the question in the title.
 
It’s not well understood how any of these effects are achieved. More generally, with a few notable exceptions, we don’t have a very well developed understanding of the semantics of how questions. That’s an issue to which our lab has recently turned, including at least four distinct but closely related lines of research. These include work on how questions in different related languages spoken in China (Mandarin and Changsha Hua) and in Ktunaxa (an endangered language spoken in British Columbia, Idaho, and Montana), and on an intriguingly idiosyncratic question word in Dutch that is also ultimately a cousin to how (about which there is a separate post below). 
 
Our immediate focus in this post concerns a another line of research: What makes it possible for how in English to sometimes mean something like why? That’s what happens in the title of this post, and it’s different from the uses of how we mentioned above. It’s not asking for a simple adverb answer that communicates the way in which something happened, and it’s not even asking for a general impression of something. But then what is it asking?
 
One clue is that although such how questions resemble why questions, they are not identical to them. There is a clear difference between these examples:
 
How is this a blog post?
Why is this a blog post?
 
They both seem to demand implicitly that this post provide an account of itself. The why question asks about reasons. Why did we choose to post this thing, of all things? Might it have been better to post something else, or nothing at all? Alternatively, might it have been better for this, whatever it is, to have been expressed in some other form (a sonnet, perhaps, or a cartoon). But that’s not what the how question asks. It’s not about reasons or causes. It’s about justifications. How could this blog post be regarded as a blog post? Indeed, inserting ‘could’ into the question doesn’t change its meaning much:
 
How could this be a blog post?
 
That, we conjecture, may be the key. This sense of how differs interestingly from others in a number of respects, but perhaps the most revealing is that it seems to have a kind of built-in ‘could’, or more precisely, an element of possibility (as reflected even more clearly in paraphrases like ‘How could this possibly be a blog post?’). Words that express what’s possible or necessary are called modals, so this species of how could be said to have a built-in modal component.
 
Why might how work this way? You can find more on this subject here. The really surprising thing, though, is that this apparently odd use of ‘how’ is not at all a quirk of English. Counterparts of this effect appear across all the typologically diverse languages mentioned above. Why? We don’t yet know. How? We’re working on it.
 
by Starr Sandoval & Marcin Morzycki

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by | · 11:27 am

Why it’s snowing, and what for

English has several different strategies for asking why. The most obvious is just to tack why onto the start of a sentence and leave it at that: Why is it snowing? Why did you leave? 
 
But there are more interesting options. How come it’s snowing? How come you left? The meaning of this is pretty similar to plain why, but the word order is different. If you simply replace the why in a why question with how come you end up with a deeply non-native sounding sentence: *How come is it snowing? *How come did you leave?
 
Yet another strategy to ask why involves what for, as in What did you leave for? But here the meaning is a little different. Trying to ask why it’s snowing this way reveals the problem. You can certainly ask What is it snowing for?, but it suggests that you think the weather might deliberately be trying to spite you. And again, the word order facts are surprising. If you’re misguided enough to follow the old-fashioned grammatical injnction against ending sentences with prepositions, you’ll be forced to ask For what did you leave? and For what is it snowing? Even the most dyed-in-the-wool pedant would have trouble claiming that this is a stylistic improvement.
 
Then there is the how that sometimes can mean ‘why’, mentioned in other posts below, and reflected in our lab’s publications on Dutch hoezo and what we’re calling propositional how in English: How is it snowing right now? How is it that you left? But this doesn’t just mean why either. 
 
That’s at least four ways to ask why, with various subtle differences among them. But this is nothing compared to German, which provides an astonishing richness of options—so many, indeed, as to deserve a separate blog post.
 
by Marcin Morzycki

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by | October 16, 2024 · 3:25 pm

Is this an alternative question or a polar question? Yes.

Linguistics jokes are great. Here is one that was posted on Facebook by linguist Jonah Katz on September 26, 2024 (original source unknown).

The humorous effect here has many layers, and draws in part on an ambiguity that occurs in written English between a polar question containing “or” and an alternative question. A polar question is one that asks for a “yes” or “no” answer from the addressee, such as “Do you like cats?”. The question in panel 2 can have this reading, and happens to contain “or” – if the speaker on the left does either of the two things, the answer would be “yes”, otherwise the answer would be “no”. An alternative question also contains “or”, but on this reading, the question does not ask for a “yes” or “no” answer; rather, the answer to an alternative question is one of the two things connected by “or” (the disjuncts). Additionally, we usually think of alternative questions as presupposing that one of the disjuncts is true.

In this meme, the polar question interpretation is likely intended by the speaker on the right – an answer of “yes” to the question as a whole would provide an explanation for why the speaker on the left’s teeth are turning yellow. (As an aside: it’s interesting that the polar question interpretation is the most natural one here, because in many contexts this is not the case.) And unless the speakers know each other quite well, it might be presumptuous for the speaker on the right to use a question form (i.e., an alternative question) that presupposes that the speaker on the left either smokes or drinks coffee. But the speaker on the left has interpreted the question as an alternative question, and answers with one of the disjuncts: He drinks coffee. So part of the humorous effect here is that the speaker on the left has mis-interpreted the speaker on the right’s question.

This ambiguity only occurs in written English. In spoken English, prosody disambiguates between the two question types. Polar questions in (many varieties of) English occur with a final rise intonation, whereas alternative questions have a rise on the first disjunct (actually, on all the non-final disjuncts if there are more than two things being connected by “or”), and a fall on the final disjunct. This means that in a real life conversation, it would be very unlikely that the speaker on the left would mis-interpret the question in panel 2, since the speaker on the right would have used one of the intonation contours, thereby disambiguating their question.

The humorous effect of the meme further draws on the fact that there are actually three readings for the question in panel 2 – there are in fact two alternative question readings, depending on exactly how the prosodic contour is pronounced, i.e., what is in focus. This in turn has an effect on how we interpret what the disjuncts are. On one structure (a): Do you [[smoke] or [drink coffee]], the question is asking whether the speaker on the left smokes or whether he drinks coffee. With the other structure (b): Do you [[smoke or drink] coffee], the question is asking whether the speaker on the left smokes coffee or drinks it. The (b) interpretation is non-sensical given world knowledge (we don’t smoke coffee), but panel 3 makes clear that this is in fact the interpretation that the speaker on the left has given the question, adding a further layer to the humour conveyed here. His use of the pronoun “it” in panel 3 is crucial here (as pointed out by Seth Cable in a comment on the aforementioned Facebook post). The use of “it” seems only compatible with the (b)-reading here – if the speaker on the left had said “I drink coffee”, this would amount to an answer to the (a)-reading of the question, and would not be construed as a joke.

by Ryan Bochnak

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by | · 3:16 pm

Why Oh Why? — The Dutch Question Word Hoezo

This sub-project zooms in on why-questions, more specifically a special kind of why-question that occurs in Dutch. Why-questions are typically used to ask for a reason or explanation (for instance, Why was the train delayed?). But reasons and explanations can be of different kinds. Dutch has two separate question words that are both usually translated in English as why, but that differ from each other in interesting ways.

In addition to waarom (the run-of-the-mill counterpart of English why), Dutch also uses the more specialized question word hoezo. Questions with waarom are pretty much like English why-questions, but hoezo (which literally means ‘how so’) is used to ask why the previous speaker just said what they did. A typical example is the following mini-dialogue between two speakers (A and B) who are waiting for a train on the station platform:
Speaker A: The trein is vertraagd. (translation: ‘The train is delayed.’)
Speaker B: Hoezo vertraagd? (loose translation: ‘What do you mean, delayed?’)

By saying hoezo, B expresses skepticism about A’s statement and challenges them to give a reason for why they made that statement. This could for instance happen if B sees a train approaching in the distance and assumes that that’s the train they are waiting for. In other words, by saying hoezo, B does not ask A why the train is delayed, but rather why A said that.

Our working hypothesis is that hoezo-questions in Dutch are used by speakers to challenge the immediately preceding discourse move by their interlocutor. Hoezo is a pragmatic question word — it can best be characterized in terms of the conditions on its use rather than by describing its literal meaning. In this way, it shares some of the characteristics of what linguists call discourse particles: little words whose function it is to regulate or manage the conversation. Discourse particles are very common in many languages (including Dutch) but are often hard to translate adequately in English. We explore the possibility that hoezo is both a discourse particle and a question word at the same time. If that’s the case, this is evidence for the existence of a novel category of words that has not previously been recognized as such in the linguistic literature. We are currently testing our hypothesis by gathering examples of hoezo and waarom from a linguistic corpus of Dutch, and analyzing them in a theoretical model of the semantics and pragmatics of questions and dialogue. In the longer run, we plan to broaden our investigation by making comparisons to other ‘why’-type question words in closely related languages, such as English why, what for, how come, and how so, and German warum and wieso.

by Hotze Rullmann and Sander Nederveen

Poster at LSA Meeting January 2024.

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