Aren’t Prosody and Syntax Marking Bias in Questions?
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
As first observed by Ladd in 1981, English polar questions with high negation (e.g., Aren’t they adding a menu item?) can be used both to check the speaker’s belief that the proposition p is true (e.g., p = they are adding a menu item) and to check the addressee’s belief that p is not true (¬ p). We hypothesized that this ambiguity can be disambiguated prosodically. We further hypothesized that the prosodic disambiguation is absent in German, because the checked proposition can be marked morpho-syntactically, with questions with high negation checking p and low negation questions (e.g., Are they not adding a menu item?) checking ¬ p. A production study tested these hypotheses with 24 speakers of Western Canadian English and German each (764 and 767 total utterances, respectively). The results showed that, when the speaker originally believed p and the addressee implied ¬ p, English speakers preferred questions with high negation over low negation questions, confirming Ladd’s observation, and used intonation to mark whose proposition they were checking, as hypothesized. By contrast, German speakers marked this distinction morpho-syntactically, realizing mostly questions with high negation to check their own proposition and low negation questions to check the addressee’s proposition. Their prosody, in turn, was largely determined by the morpho-syntactic question form. The study further manipulated the speaker’s certainty of the checked proposition, but, in contrast to studies on Romance languages, found that certainty itself was not marked.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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