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Or not alternative questions like Are you coming or not? give rise to so-called ‘cornering effects’ (Biezma 2009), consisting of two parts: (i) they cannot appear discourse-initially, and (ii) they do not allow for follow-up questions. Building on recent experimental data (Beltrama, Meertens & Romero 2020), the present paper raises problems for current analyses (Biezma 2009, Biezma & Rawlins 2012, 2018), reframes the second part of cornering as not specific to NAQs but as a general constraint on questions in general, and develops a novel proposal for the first part of cornering. The key ingredients of the new proposal are the intrinsic focus structure of or not questions and its effects on discourse trees. published

El presente trabajo de grado identificó como problemática el uso instrumentalizado de la tecnología en niños y niñas de tres años durante las visitas que éstos realizaron en la Biblioteca Pública El Tintal Manuel Zapata Olivella. A partir de la caracterización de la necesidad se plantea como objetivo proponer una estrategia didáctica para la promoción de lectura desde el uso de la tecnología para niños y niñas de 3 años de la Biblioteca Pública El Tintal Manuel Zapata Olivella de la ciudad de Bogotá D.C. The present degree work identified as problematic the instrumentalized use of technology in three-year-old boys and girls during their visits to the Manuel Zapata Olivella El Tintal Public Library. Based on the characterization of the need, the objective is to propose a didactic strategy for the promotion of reading from the use of technology for 3-year-old boys and girls of the El Tintal Manuel Zapata Olivella Public Library of the city of Bogotá D.C.

Alternative Questions (AltQs) are typically characterized by two prosodic cues: a final falling boundary tone and a pitch accent on each disjunct. Recent accounts in the literature have taken the final fall as the central surface cue for AltQ interpretation or have assigned a vacuous semantic contribution to the multiple accent on the disjuncts. Based on data from English and Turkish, we argue that both cues are equally important and require modelling in a unified account of AltQs. Combining ingredients from the literature (Roberts, 1996; Biezma, 2009; Westera, 2017), we propose that, essentially, the multiple accent shapes the Question under Discussion (QUD) and that the final fall, or the lack thereof, indicates restrictions on the content of the QUD via (un)satisfaction of Attention Maxims., Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, Vol 23 No 2 (2019): Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23

In certain environments, negation does not anti-license Positive Polarity Items in English and can precede definite noun phrases in German. Instances of negation with these characteristics are labeled 'high' negation. There are two environments where high negation –as opposed to regular, 'low' negation– has been argued to correlate with an additional meaning effect: mandatory counterfactuality in subjunctive conditionals and obligatory epistemic bias in polar questions. Analyses of high negation in the literature have targeted one construction or the other, but not both. The present paper provides an unified analysis of high negation that derives its interpretive effects in both environments., Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, Vol 19 (2015): Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 19

Alternative Questions with “or not” (NAQ) convey a cornering effect, which is not found with they polar counterparts (PQ). This effect has been claimed to consist of two parts (Biezma 2009): NAQs (i) cannot be used discourse-initially and (ii) they do not license followup questions/subquestions. In this paper, we ask the following: Are both parts of cornering linked to the same property of NAQs? Or do they reflect distinct linguistic phenomena? We explore the issue by comparing the behavior of NAQs to Complement Alternative Questions (CAQ), a type of question that, like NAQs, presents logically opposite alternatives but, unlike NAQs, fully spells out the second one. Results from two experiments suggest that both parts of cornering can instead be explained in terms of independent semantic and pragmatic principles, which operate beyond the domain of alternative questions. Keywords: Alternative Questions, cornering, discourse, focus, information structure., ZAS Papers in Linguistics, Bd. 60 (2018): Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, 1

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