I show that speaker bias in polarity focus questions (PFQs) is context sensitive, while speaker bias in high negation questions (HNQs) is context insensitive. This leads me to develop separate accounts of speaker bias in each of these kinds of polar questions. I argue that PFQ bias derives from the fact that they are frequently used in conversational contexts in which an answer to the question has already been asserted by an interlocutor, thus expressing doubt about the prior assertion. This derivation explains their context sensitivity, and the fact that similar bias arises from polar questions that lack polarity focus. I also provide novel evidence that the prejacents of HNQs lack negation, and thus only have an outer negation reading (see, e.g., Ladd in Papers from the seventeenth regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, vol. 17, pp. 164–171, 1981; Romero and Han in Linguistics and Philosophy 27(5):609–658, 2004; Krifka in Contrastiveness in information structure, alternatives and scalar implicatures, pp. 359–398, 2017; AnderBois in Questions in discourse, pp. 118–171, 2019; Frana and Rawlins in Semantics and Pragmatics 12(16):1–48, 2019; Jeong in Journal of Semantics 38(1):49–94, 2020). Based on a treatment of HNQs as denoting unbalanced partitions (Romero and Han in Linguistics and Philosophy 27(5):609–658, 2004), and competition with their positive polar question alternatives, I propose a novel derivation of speaker bias in HNQs as a conversational implicature. Roughly, if the speaker is ignorant, then a positive polar question will be more useful because it is more informative, so the use of an HNQ conveys that the speaker is not ignorant. The denotation of the HNQ then makes clear which way the speaker is biased. The result separates high negation from verum focus, and I argue that it is more parsimonious and has better empirical coverage than prior accounts.

我表明极性焦点问题(PFQ) 中的说话人偏见是上下文敏感的，而高否定问题中的说话人偏见(HNQs) 是上下文不敏感的。这导致我对每一种极端问题中的说话者偏见进行了单独的解释。我认为 PFQ 偏见源于这样一个事实，即它们经常用于会话上下文中，在会话上下文中，对话者已经断言了问题的答案，从而表达了对先前断言的怀疑。这种推导解释了他们对上下文的敏感性，以及类似的偏见源于缺乏极性焦点的极性问题这一事实。我还提供了新的证据表明 HNQ 的前缀没有否定，因此只有外部否定阅读（参见，例如，Ladd in Papers from the teentient regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, vol. 17, pp. 164–171, 1981；罗梅罗和汉在语言学和哲学中 27(5):609–658, 2004；Krifka in Contrastiveness in information structure, alternatives and scalar implicatures, pp. 359–398, 2017; AnderBois in 话语中的问题，第 118-171 页，2019 年；语义学和语用学中的弗拉纳和罗林斯 12(16):1–48, 2019；Jeong in Journal of Semantics 38(1):49–94, 2020)。基于 HNQ 表示不平衡分区的处理（Romero 和 Han in Linguistics and Philosophy 27(5):609–658, 2004），以及与他们的积极极性问题替代方案的竞争，我提出了 HNQ 中说话人偏见的新推导：会话含义。粗略地说，如果说话者是无知的，那么正面的极性问题会更有用，因为它提供的信息更多，因此使用 HNQ 表示说话者并非无知。HNQ 的含义可以清楚地表明说话者偏向哪种方式。