Open Access<em>Or not</em> Alternative Questions, Focus and Discourse Structure
Author(s) -
Maribel Romero,
Erlinde Meertens,
Andrea Beltrama
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
experiments in linguistic meaning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2694-1791
DOI - 10.3765/elm.1.5026
Subject(s) - focus (optics) , constraint (computer aided design) , key (lock) , sociology , computer science , mathematics , physics , computer security , geometry , optics
Or not alternative questions like Are you coming or not? give rise to so-called ‘cornering effects’ (Biezma 2009), consisting of two parts: (i) they cannot appear discourse-initially, and (ii) they do not allow for follow-up questions. Building on recent experimental data (Beltrama, Meertens & Romero 2020), the present paper raises problems for current analyses (Biezma 2009, Biezma & Rawlins 2012, 2018), reframes the second part of cornering as not specific to NAQs but as a general constraint on questions in general, and develops a novel proposal for the first part of cornering. The key ingredients of the new proposal are the intrinsic focus structure of or not questions and its effects on discourse trees.