Biased Questions Project Answers to Resolve Issues

The previous literature has distinguished between two types of bias in polar questions: “original bias”, which reflects the speaker’s prior belief regarding the truth of the answers, and “contextual bias”, which conveys freshly introduced evidence for or against a given answer. Building on these two fundamental biases and employing a novel diagnostic based on bare polar response particles, we argue for the existence of a third type of bias, which we call “projected bias”, indicating the answer that the speaker considers most likely to enter the Common Ground. We posit this flavor of bias on account of its distinct alignment pattern, which cannot be attributed to merely mirroring one of the two fundamental biases or to a random choice between the two. Specifically, while projected bias requires the presence of a fundamental bias in order to arise, it may align with either of them and displays a strong affinity with contextual bias when the two fundamental biases are in conflict. We capture this alignment pattern by appealing to differences in evidential strength between original and contextual bias, thereby highlighting the manner in which projected bias coordinates on the discourse goal shared by the speaker and the addressee of resolving the issue raised by the question. We make our proposal explicit by implementing it within the Scoreboard Model.