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The words 'yes' and 'no' may seem like two of the easiest expressions to understand in any language, but their actual behaviour and interpretation are surprisingly difficult to pin down. In a paper published in the scholarly journal Language, two linguists examine the workings of 'yes' and 'no' and show that understanding them leads to new insights concerning the understanding of questions and statements more generally.
Floris Roelofsen (University of Amsterdam) and Donka F. Farkas (UC -- Santa Cruz) provide a comprehensive account of 'polarity particles', as these words are called, across languages, and explain the intricate pattern of their distribution. For example, "Yes, it is" and "No, it isn't" are acceptable answers to the question "Is the door open or is it not open?," but not to "Is the door open or is it closed?." Furthermore, the intonation used when pronouncing a sentence can affect whether 'yes' or 'no' are appropriate responses to it.
The original article came from Science Daily, but was also covered by phys.org.
The abstract (full study available to subscribers only) can be found at the Project Muse page from Johns Hopkins University.
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by steveha on Saturday June 20 2015, @05:32AM
When I learned Japanese, I decided that "hai" doesn't really mean "yes", it means "correct". And "iie" means "incorrect". If you think of it that way, the Japanese idioms make perfect sense. "You cannot open that?" "Correct, cannot open." "You don't want to eat any of this?" "Correct, don't want." Or, if they actually want some: "Incorrect, want, please."
I saw a poster in a train station. It showed a young woman saying "NO!" in English; the rest of the poster was in Japanese. I asked a friend and was told that the poster is saying something like "Don't grope women on the train; they don't want you to do that." I think "NO!" is a more forceful negation than Japanese words like "iie".