---
title: "Intonation, <i>yes</i> and <i>no</i> — Goodhue 2018"
description: "In English, yes and no can swap roles when someone responds to a negative question such as \"Is… 53 references, cited by 6 papers here."
authors: ["Daniel Goodhue", "Michael Wagner"]
year: 2018
venue: "Glossa: a journal of general linguistics"
source: "https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/4973/"
doi: "10.5334/gjgl.210"
licence: "CC BY 4.0"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/goodhue-2018-intonation-i-yes-i-i/"
---
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# Intonation, \<i>yes\</i> and \<i>no\</i>

**Authors:** [Daniel Goodhue](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/daniel-goodhue/) and [Michael Wagner](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/michael-wagner/) · **Year:** 2018 · **Venue:** [Glossa: a journal of general linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/) ([Glossa a journal of general linguistics 2018](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/2018/)) · **Publisher:** [Ubiquity Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/ubiquity-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.210) · [PDF](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/4973/galley/12035/download) · [DOI 10.5334/gjgl.210](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.210) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2783124930)

**Citations:** 30 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · 6 in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
In English, *yes* and *no* can swap roles when someone responds to a negative question such as "Is Jane not coming?": either particle can confirm or deny. After a positive question they cannot. The authors review four theories of this "interchangeability": Kramer & Rawlins 2009, Krifka 2013, Roelofsen & Farkas 2015 and Holmberg 2016. They argue that each theory captures something real, so a synthesis may be needed. They then test three questions experimentally:

- Does intonation on the particles track whether the answer is positive or negative?
- Which particles do speakers prefer, and when?
- Do those preferences depend on the polarity of earlier sentences in the context?

Production studies used scripted dialogues with polar questions and rising declaratives. A perception study varied the intonation of bare particles, and a reading study adapted Meijer et al. (2015) to English. The main finding is that speakers often put the contradiction contour (Liberman & Sag 1974) on positive, disagreeing replies to negative questions. This tune strongly changes how listeners interpret a bare *yes* or *no*. Particle preferences did not seem to depend on the polarity of the preceding context. The upshot is that theories of polar particles must account for prosody.

## Key points
- The paper studies only low-negation questions ("Is Jane not coming?"). High-negation questions ("Isn't Jane coming?") behave like positive ones in American English, and an item-by-item analysis showed participants never read the test items as high negation.
- Earlier findings it builds on:
  - Brasoveanu et al. (2013): *no* is preferred over *yes* for agreeing with a negative declarative.
  - Kramer & Rawlins (2012): bare particles lean toward the negative answer.
  - The authors' own felicity ratings partly replicate these results.
- New experimental comparisons, never tested before:
  - replies to polar questions vs. rising declaratives;
  - *yes* vs. *yeah*.
- Main results:
  - The contradiction contour (CC) appeared mainly on positive responses, whether the question was positive or negative.
  - Rise-fall intonation was spread fairly evenly across conditions.
  - The perception study compared only CC against falling intonation.
- Resources and venue: audio files of the key examples are released (DOI 10.5334/gjgl.210.s1) for inspection in Praat. The article appeared in Glossa 3(1), 2018, 45 pages.

## Interesting ideas
- Krifka treats a negative clause as offering two propositional antecedents, one for the inner positive clause (TP) and one for the negated clause (NegP), with *yes* asserting and *no* negating whichever is picked up; this explains why the particles become ambiguous only after negation.
- A negative question is only appropriate when the context offers evidence for the negative answer, so a positive reply amounts to disagreeing with that evidence, not just supplying information.
- The authors tell apart high negation (negation attached to the auxiliary) and low negation (after the subject) because the two behave differently with answer particles.
- In text there is no contradiction contour, so a bare particle replying to a negative question is ambiguous, and readers tend to default to the negative reading.
- The reading study flips only the polarity of the preceding context to test whether particle preferences depend on it, a clean minimal-pair design. Checking item by item for unintended readings complements it.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (frames): when a negative polar question is processed, keep both the positive and the negated proposition as candidate referents, and resolve a following bare *yes*/*no* against them rather than against a single proposition.
- **I2** (world): store the evidence state behind a negative question in the world model, so a later positive reply is recorded as contradicting that evidence.
- **I3** (tree): flag in the UD tree whether negation is fused with a fronted auxiliary or follows the subject, and pass that flag on so pragmatics treats the two question types differently.
- **I4** (answer): when Mova reads a bare *yes*/*no* reply to a negative question, mark the interpretation as uncertain unless a following clause ("she is") settles it; when producing answers, always add the clause.
- **I5** (learn): build minimal-pair evaluation sets that change only context polarity, as a negative control showing whether learned particle resolution relies on irrelevant context cues.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

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## Cite

Cite as: Daniel Goodhue and Michael Wagner. 2018. Intonation, \<i>yes\</i> and \<i>no\</i>. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{goodhue2018intonation,
  title = {{Intonation, <i>yes</i> and <i>no</i>}},
  author = {Daniel Goodhue and Michael Wagner},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.210},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.210}
}
```

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51. How to cite this article: Goodhue, Daniel and Michael Wagner. 2018. Intonation, yes and no. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3(1): 5. 1–45, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.210 [↗](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.210)
52. Published: 10 January 2018 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Published%3A+10+January+2018)
53. Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS [↗](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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