title: Is Mandarin Chinese a Truth-Based Language? Rejecting Responses to Negative Assertions and Questions.
abstract: This paper addresses the central question of whether Mandarin Chinese (MC) is a canonical truth-based language, a language that is expected to express the speaker's disagreement to a negative proposition by means of a negative particle followed by a positive sentence. Eight native speakers of MC participated in an oral Discourse Completion Task that elicited rejecting responses to negative assertions/questions and broad focus statements (control condition). Results show that MC speakers convey reject by relying on a combination of lexico-syntactic strategies (e.g., negative particles such asbù, méi(yǒu), and positive sentences) together with prosodic (e.g., mean pitch) and gestural strategies (mainly, the use of head nods). Importantly, the use of a negative particle, which was the expected outcome in truth-based languages, only appeared in 52% of the rejecting answers. This system puts into question the macroparametric division between truth-based and polarity-based languages and calls for a more general view of the instantiation of a reject speech act that integrates lexical and syntactic strategies with prosodic and gestural strategies.
authors.affiliation: Department of Catalan Philology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Feifei
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Prosodic Studies Group, Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Santiago
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: González-Fuente
authors.affiliation: Prosodic Studies Group, Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)Barcelona, Spain; Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA)Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Pilar
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Prieto
authors.affiliation: Department of Catalan Philology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: M Teresa
authors.initials: MT
authors.lastname: Espinal
keywords: Mandarin Chinese; REJECT; disagreement; negative propositions; truth-based language