[PLing] Talk by Anna Staňková on April 18, 13:15 CET

[Madeleine Butschety]

Dear colleagues, 

we cordially invite you to a talk by Anna Sta ňková (Charles University Prague) as part of the Jezik & Linguistics Colloquia series. Her talk entitled "Word order in Czech polar questions" will take place this Thursday, April 18, at 13:15 CET at lecture room P1 at the University of Nova Gorica, and online. The abstract of the talk can be found below. 

To attend via Zoom, please use the following link: [ https://ungsi.zoom.us/j/63598237540?pwd=RHBIZ1lSU0FNbEpZaVo4VStmUFVZdz09 | https://ungsi.zoom.us/j/63598237540?pwd=RHBIZ1lSU0FNbEpZaVo4VStmUFVZdz09 ] 

We hope to see many of you there! 

Best, 
Madeleine Butschety, on behalf of the Center for Cognitive Science of Language 


>>ANNA STA Ň KOVÁ 
"Word order in Czech polar questions" 

The default strategy of forming a polar question in Czech is employing the interrogative (= verb-first) word order. Declarative word order (canonical SVO) in polar questions also occurs, although only under certain conditions. I claim that the declarative word order is motivated either by the speaker’s intention to convey evidential bias (question pragmatics), or by the presence of a contrastive topic (information structure). Declarative PQs (e.g. Petr četl ten e-mail? ‘ Petr has read the e-mail?’) are used if the speaker expects that the answer to her PQ will be p (= Petr has read the e-mail) based on publicly shared evidence in the Common Ground. Declarative biased PQs with negation (= Petr nečetl ten e-mail? ‘ Petr hasn’t read the e-mail?’) expect ¬p as an answer. However, declarative PQs can also be used in bias-neutral contexts (where there is no bias towards p nor ¬p), although here they are expected to contain a contrastive topic which precedes the main verb. Apart from PQs with and without inner (semantic) negation, I will consider PQs with the so-called outer negation. The talk will present results from a corpus study and from a naturalness judgment task to support the claims. 
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