Decomposing cornering effects

an experimental study

Abstract

Alternative Questions with “or not” (NAQ) convey a cornering effect, which is not
found with they polar counterparts (PQ). This effect has been claimed to consist of two parts
(Biezma 2009): NAQs (i) cannot be used discourse-initially and (ii) they do not license followup
questions/subquestions. In this paper, we ask the following: Are both parts of cornering
linked to the same property of NAQs? Or do they reflect distinct linguistic phenomena? We
explore the issue by comparing the behavior of NAQs to Complement Alternative Questions
(CAQ), a type of question that, like NAQs, presents logically opposite alternatives but, unlike
NAQs, fully spells out the second one. Results from two experiments suggest that both parts of
cornering can instead be explained in terms of independent semantic and pragmatic principles,
which operate beyond the domain of alternative questions.
Keywords: Alternative Questions, cornering, discourse, focus, information structure.