The meaning of Czech response particles

This article deals with the semantics and interpretation of Czech response particles
ano ‘yes’ and ne ‘no’. Based on two experiments involving responses to negative
polar questions, we argue that ano ‘yes’ encodes the relative feature [agree] and ne
‘no’ encodes the absolute feature [−], adopting the parlance of Roelofsen & Farkas’s
(2015) feature model. This contrasts with the proposal of Gruet-Skrabalova (2016),
who argues, following previous work on English, that both of the Czech response
particles are ambiguous between a relative and an absolute reading. We also find
some tentative evidence for context affecting the interpretation of response
particles, in line with the predictions of Krifka (2013).