Biased questions: Experimental results and theoretical modelling (Hardback or Cased Book)

Asking a question means, essentially, presenting the hearer with a set of propositions with the request that she choose from it those that are true. It is a well-known fact about natural language that questions can be "biased": the propositions presented are not all equal, so to speak. For example, the speaker's belief, or contextual evidence, might favor some against others. The formal means employed by grammar to express such biases have been of interest to linguists for a long time, and the investigation is still on-going. The contributions in this volume all pertain to biased questions. They grew out of talks presented at the workshop Biased Questions: Experimental Results and Theoretical Modelling, which took place at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft as part of the ERC project Speech Acts in Grammar and Discourse (SPAGAD). The papers are written by mostly senior researchers of different expertise who have previously published on the same topic, and explore this fascinating linguistic phenomenon from a variety of theoretical angles: pragmatics, semantics, syntax, phonology, psychology, and acquisition. The languages under discussion include Chinese, English, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, and Vietnamese. The collection provides the reader with a rich set of data and several open issues for future research.

PD Dr. Tue Trinh works at the Center for Cognitive Science of Language of the University of Nova Gorica. His research spans various topics including numerals, questions, implicatures, and speech acts.

Anton Benz studied Mathematics at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, where he also gained a doctorate in Philosophy. He worked briefly on a linguistic research project at Humboldt University before becoming Assistant Professor in Humanistic Information Science at the University of Southern Denmark, Kolding. He then moved to the ZAS in Berlin, where he is now a senior researcher in semantics and pragmatics. His main research topic is the area of pragmatics. He works experimentally, computationally, and theoretically. He was one of the first to promote game theory as a framework for analysing the interaction of interlocutors in conversation. He published on Gricean pragmatics, including, for example, relevance implicatures, implicatures of optimal answers, and implicatures of complex sentences. Other areas of interest include knowledge updates in dialogue, the role of questions under discussion in discourse, and speech act theory. He uses a variety of methods in his research, including game-theoretic and probabilistic modelling, experiments, and computational testing. His main research topic is the area of pragmatics. He works experimentally, computationally, and theoretically. He was one of the first to promote game theory as a framework for analysing the interaction of interlocutors in conversation. He published on Gricean pragmatics, including, for example, relevance implicatures, implicatures of optimal answers, and implicatures of complex sentences. Other areas of interest include knowledge updates in dialogue, the role of questions under discussion in discourse, and speech act theory. He uses a variety of methods in his research, including game-theoretic and probabilistic modelling, experiments, and computational testing.

Dr. Daniel Goodhue was a researcher in the ERC project Speech Acts in Grammar and Discourse (SPAGAD). His research explains complex meaning phenomena from independently motivated grammatical representations (semantics, syntax, and prosody) and pragmatic principles.

Dr. Kazuko Yatsushiro is a senior researcher at ZAS in the Research Area 2 'Language Development & Multilingualism'. Her research focuses on the theoretical investigation of language acquisition, especially in the areas of syntax (relative clauses and Wh-questions), semantics, pragmatics and their interfaces. She is particularly interested in the effect of alternative expressions and constructions in language production and speech comprehension in children.

Manfred Krifka studied Theoretical Linguistics and Logic, Philosophy and Theory of Science at the University of Munich. After appointments at the universities of Konstanz and Tübingen, he joined the University of Texas at Austin for ten years before becoming full professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin for General Linguistics, and director of ZAS. He has been fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Stanford and of the Institut of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and he has received the Meyer-Struckmann Price of the University of Düsseldorf for research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. After his retirement, he is Senior Fellow at ZAS. His research concentrated on semantics, pragmatics, and the syntax-semantics interface. His main research topics were the semantics of mass nouns and plurals and the interplay of their meaning with aspectual classes, kind reference and generic or habitual meaning, information structure, in particular the interpretation of focus as introducing alternatives and the semantics of questions, dynamic theories of meaning, in particular varieties of definiteness, and more recently the nature and modelling of speech acts, in the context of an ERC Advanced Grant project. He is also involved in linguistic field work and language documentation, in particular with the language Daakie in Ambrym, Vanuatu, which was partly funded by VolkswagenFoundation, and the creole language Bislama in Vanuatu, as part of the CRC “Register” at Humbold University.