On Certain Epistemic Implicatures in Yes/No Questions

Abstract

Inverted or preposed negation in yes/no (yn-)questions contributes the implicature that the speaker expects the answer to be in the affirmative (Ladd (1981), Han (1998), Gunlogson and Buring (2000)). For instance, the intuition is that (1) asks whether John drinks and implies that the speaker believes or at least expects that John drinks. Note also that ynquestions with non-preposed negation do not necessarily have this implicature. (2) can be another way of seeking information on whether John is a teetotaler (cf., Han (1999)). We will call this type of implicature epistemic implicature.