Asking questions is a deeply human experience. All human languages have a way of posing questions, including
those that can be answered with yes or no, known as polar questions. The meaning of these utterances feels as
undebatable as their conceptual primacy. One interlocutor describes a possible scenario in a form that requests a
response, and the second interlocutor, by answering yes or no, tells them to the best of their knowledge if that is the
case or not. As such, the formal meaning of polar questions, the “code” that returns "did you vote" if you enter "you
voted", seems nothing other than a primitive logical operation that is conceivably identical across languages.
Intuitive as it seems, a singular core meaning is at odds with the observed empirical complexity. Polar questions
may encode nuanced meaning components such as bias and usage restrictions, and have diverse expressions in the
morphosyntax and intonation. Languages do not behave in a uniform manner in these respects, either. While the
sporadic research on languages beyond the few most widely studied languages have confirmed some components
of our understanding of polar question meaning, they have also introduced a staggering range of novel nuances,
clusterings between them, and unexpected structural correlates. How can languages create such rich and varying paradigms of nuances and
form-meaning correspondences out of a simple shared logical operation?
I offer what I call the Duality of Primary Polar Question Meanings as a way forward. There are two universally available meanings, but their differences may be empirically
obscured to lead to the impression of a singular meaning. To use a color analogy: Polar question meaning may appear to be singular and indivisible red, but it is in fact composed of two optical components- magenta and yellow- each with intrinsic differences driving different effects. Like the two colors reflecting red in overlap, if observable evidence for the multiplicity of underlying
components is lacking, the meaning will misleadingly appear to be singular. In this metaphor, languages with rich paradigms of polar question forms flaunt their magenta and yellow separately, whereas in a language like English, one color always hides behind the other, appearing red.
This approach makes it possible to evaluate the unexpected empirical complexity in reflections of polar question
meaning in a whole new light: Puzzling effects of what looks like red are effects of magenta or/and yellow. This
way, the large range of nuanced meanings and form-meaning interactions can be predicted, and for the first time,
limits of variation can be explored. The overarching objective of this project is to develop a crosslinguistically
realistic model of polar question meaning and a framework of its variation from this novel perspective of
Duality.
