A semantic analysis of or not questions

BA thesis, project report, and poster.

This paper studies the differences between polar questions and alternative questions with or not, categorizes the latter with the notion of epistemic bias, formally represents question types with the notion of highlighting under the framework of inquisitive semantics, and testifies the analysis with a semantic-map approach. From the perspective of bias, polar questions are felicitous in non-negative-bias contexts; alternative questions with or not are felicitous in double bias and sometimes no bias contexts. Or not questions can be grouped into four, based on whether there is no bias or double bias in the context, as well as the existence of cornering effect. The semantic-map feature clustering results of the corpus data have suggested the same. Logically, or not questions highlight both possibilities, polar questions highlight one, and alternative questions have different settings for possible worlds and thus different highlighted possibilities.