Contextual bias and the landscape of Mandarin polar questions

Mandarin Chinese has at least three kinds of polar questions, positive ma questions,
negative ma questions and A-not-A questions, which have similar semantics but
are not totally interchangeable. In particular, they carry different bias connotations.
We show that their bias meanings and distribution are best characterized by the
notion of contextual bias, which is formalized in terms of the subjective probability
distribution within the framework of Farkas & Bruce’s (2010) Table model. Our
analysis offers a simple lexical semantics for ma questions by employing pragmatic
competition, and supports the idea that prosodic contours like the Final Fall in
A-not-A questions are intonational morphemes that carry semantic contents.