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Proceedings of the 24th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics edited by John Alderete, Chung-hye Han, and Alexei Kochetov ISBN 1-57473-407-5 library binding vi + 405 pages publication date: 2005 published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA Table of contents Abstract Maribel Romero Two Approaches to Biased Yes/No Questions 352-360 (complete pdf) Questions with really like Did Jorge really bring a present?, questions with preposed negation like Doesn't John drink?, and in some contexts even plain questions like Is it raining? convey an epistemic bias of the speaker. Two main approaches to this bias have been discussed in the recent literature: the VERUM approach with the operator VERUM as the key factor, and the Decision Theory approach with utility values. The present paper compares the two approaches and argues that, while utility values are useful for questions in general, the operator VERUM is needed to derive the grammatical and interpretive properties of biased questions. |