[Lingtyp] Answers to polarity questions: a typological study

[Anders Holmberg]

Dear Elena,

You may or may not be aware that I've written a book about the syntax of yes-no questions and answers with, in part, a typological perspective: A. Holmberg.2016. The syntax of yes and no. Oxford University Press. I have data there from 136 languages, some from the literature but more from the Syntactic Structures of the World's Languages (SSWL) database. If you look up the database you will see that I have posted a set of questions there about answers to yes-no questions, which have been answered by experts of a range of languages, which is how the database works. There are answers there now from more languages than when I wrote the book.


Best wishes,

Anders



Prof. Anders Holmberg
School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU
UK
________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Elena Moser <elemoser at gmail.com>
Sent: 12 February 2018 15:23:33
To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu; lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: [Lingtyp] Answers to polarity questions: a typological study

Dear All

I am a Master student at the department of linguistics at the Stockholm University.

For my Magister thesis, I am investigating the different strategies languages all around the world employ to answer polarity questions (also know as yes-no questions).
Although many reference grammars contain a section devoted to the structure of polarity questions, the strategy used to reply to such interrogatives are rarely discussed. This is the reason why I designed a translation questionnaire for the collection of the data of this study.

The questionnaire contains 11 items. Experience has shown that the completion of the questionnaire takes participants between 15 minutes up to 1 hour (depending on how thorough they are with their answers).

I am grateful to all language experts, who are willing to take some time to fill out the questionnaire for a language of their expertise. The questionnaire is attached to this e-mail in PDF format. The participants are free to either directly annotate the PDF, request a link to a Google document or to create a separate document file and send this to me in, preferably, PDF format as well.

Should you have any questions about the project, feel free to contact me. I am also open to suggestions concerning the questionnaire design or resources on this topic.

My email address is  elmo7609 at student.su.se<mailto:elmo7609 at student.su.se>



Needless to say I am very grateful for all your time and help!

Best regards,
Elena



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20180215/2e47151e/attachment.htm>