<html><body><div style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000"><div><span data-mce-bogus="1" data-mce-type="format-caret"><span data-mce-bogus="1" data-mce-type="format-caret"><span style="font-size: 11pt;" data-mce-style="font-size: 11pt;">Dear colleagues, <br><br>we cordially invite you to a talk by Anna Sta<span style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;" data-mce-style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;" lang="SL"><span style="float: none; word-spacing: 0px;" data-mce-style="float: none; word-spacing: 0px;">ňková </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;" data-mce-style="font-size: 11pt;">(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. <br><br>To attend via Zoom, please use the following link: <a href="https://ungsi.zoom.us/j/63598237540?pwd=RHBIZ1lSU0FNbEpZaVo4VStmUFVZdz09">https://ungsi.zoom.us/j/63598237540?pwd=RHBIZ1lSU0FNbEpZaVo4VStmUFVZdz09</a><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 11pt;" data-mce-style="font-size: 11pt;"><br data-mce-bogus="1"></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 11pt;" data-mce-style="font-size: 11pt;">We hope to see many of you there!<br data-mce-bogus="1"></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 11pt;" data-mce-style="font-size: 11pt;"><br data-mce-bogus="1"></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 11pt;" data-mce-style="font-size: 11pt;">Best,<br data-mce-bogus="1"></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 11pt;" data-mce-style="font-size: 11pt;">Madeleine Butschety, on behalf of the Center for Cognitive Science of Language<br data-mce-bogus="1"></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 11pt;" data-mce-style="font-size: 11pt;"><br data-mce-bogus="1"></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 11pt;" data-mce-style="font-size: 11pt;"><br data-mce-bogus="1"></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 11pt;" data-mce-style="font-size: 11pt;">>>ANNA STA<span class="BxUVEf ILfuVd" lang="de"><span class="hgKElc">Ň</span></span>KOVÁ</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 11pt;" data-mce-style="font-size: 11pt;">"Word order in Czech polar questions"<br data-mce-bogus="1"></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 11pt;" data-mce-style="font-size: 11pt;"><br data-mce-bogus="1"></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 11pt;" data-mce-style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;" data-mce-style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">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. </span><span style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;" data-mce-style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Petr četl ten e-mail? </span><span style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;" data-mce-style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;" lang="EN-US">‘</span><span style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;" data-mce-style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Petr has read the e-mail?’) are used if the speaker expects that the answer to her PQ will be </span><span style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;" data-mce-style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">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? </span><span style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;" data-mce-style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;" lang="EN-US">‘</span><span style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;" data-mce-style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Petr hasn’t read the e-mail?’) expect </span><span style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;" data-mce-style="font-family: 'arial', sans-serif; color: black; background: white none repeat scroll 0% 0%;">¬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.</span><br data-mce-bogus="1"></span></div></div></body></html>