11 - 13 April 2024, Polar Question Meaning[s] across Languages

The last decade has seen a steady increase in work on question meaning, in particular polar question meaning, with relatively new notions like bias becoming front and center. At the same time, the empirical field has widened to include some understanding of various forms fulfilling the polar question function. Spanning not only interrogatives but also declaratives, tags, and alternatives, these forms raise important questions for the relationship between form and meaning. This workshop brings together work that continues this line of research. Topics range from fromal accounts of aspects of polar(-like) question forms across languages to manifestations of meaning in pragmatic and social levels that connect to formal grammatical events such as clausal structure, negation, focus and intonation.

Invited speakers: Diti Bhadra (University of Minnesota), Regine Eckardt (Konstanz University), Lisa Matthewson (University of British Columbia) and Deniz Rudin (University of Southern California).