Polar questions in Czech and Russian: An exploratory corpus investigation

This study aims to bring new insights into the topic of polar questions in Czech
and Russian based on corpus data. What is of particular interest are the complex
differences in meaning among the Czech and Russian counterparts of English
 structures such as Is Jane coming?, Isn’t Jane coming? and Is Jane not coming?. We
 examine the formal and semantic/pragmatic features of polar questions in these two
Slavic languages, namely word order, presence and position of negation, presence
of question tags, presence of question particles, and their relation to the question’s
meaning and its bias towards a possible answer. Using authentic data from spo-
ken corpora allowed us to observe some prominent tendencies of polar questions
usage.