Maryam Mohammadi
2023
mage as a bias particle in interrogatives
Maryam Mohammadi
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary
This paper investigates Farsi particle ‘mage’ in interrogatives, including both polar and constituent/Wh questions. I will show that ‘mage’ requires both contextual evidence and speaker’s prior belief in the sense that they contradict each other. While in polar questions (PQs) both types of bias can be straightforwardly expressed through the uttered proposition (cf. Mameni 2010), Wh-questions (WhQs) do not provide such a propositional object. To capture this difference, I propose Answerhood as the relevant notation that provides the necessary object source for ‘mage’ (inspired by Theiler 2021). The proposal establishes the felicity conditions and the meaning of ‘mage’ in relation to the (contextually) restricted answerhood in both polar and constituent questions.