Intonation, <i>yes</i> and <i>no</i>
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
English polar particles yes and no are interchangeable in response to negative sentences, that is, either one can be used to convey both positive and negative responses. We provide a critical discussion of recent research into this phenomenon (Kramer &amp; Rawlins 2009; Krifka 2013; Roelofsen &amp; Farkas 2015; Holmberg 2016), which leads to three questions: Does the intonation produced on yes and no depend on whether the response is positive or negative, and can intonation affect the interpretation of bare polar particle responses? Which particles do speakers prefer to use when? Are preference patterns sensitive to the polarity of preceding sentences in the context? In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that the contradiction contour (Liberman &amp; Sag 1974) is an intonation that is commonly produced on positive responses to negative sentences, and that it affects hearers’ interpretations of bare particle responses. Beyond intonation, our experimental results add new evidence regarding speakers’ preferences for using yes and no in response to negative polar questions and rising declaratives. Finally, our results suggest that preference patterns are not sensitive to the polarity of context sentences.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it