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Částice náhodou a snad ve zjišťovacích otázkách

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Chodounská M., Koštejnová A., Šimík R.

Slovo a slovesnost: časopis pro otázky teorie a kultury jazyka (Slovo a slovesnost: A journal for the theory of language and language cultivation)

2025

vol. 86

issue 3

203-235

The article focuses on the meaning and distribution of two Czech particles – náhodou ‘by any chance’ and snad (without a straightforward translation to English) – in direct and indirect polar questions. We argue that these particles are epistemic in the sense that they systematically appear in polar questions whose main goal is to acquire new information, rather than, say, make an offer or a request. The particles contribute mainly to the so-called question biases, i.e., they help indicate the speaker’s (in direct questions) or attitude holder’s (in indirect questions) attitude to one or both of the propositional alternatives in the denotation of the question. This attitude can either be based on prior beliefs (so-called epistemic bias) or currently relevant evidence (evidential bias). Relying on a corpus analysis (looking at both snad and náhodou) and a naturalness rating experiment (on náhodou), we draw inferences about the interpretive and distributional impact that the particles have on the polar question in which they appear. We find that náhodou is limited to negative questions and that it mostly contributes positive bias (both epistemic and evidential). The particle snad mostly conveys that the two biases (epistemic and evidential) are in conflict. We also observe a significant weakening of both particles’ meaning contribution in indirect questions.

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1 Slovo a slovesnost: časopis pro otázky teorie a kultury jazyka (Slovo a slovesnost: A journal for the theory of language and language cultivation)

1 Chodounská M.

1 Koštejnová A.

1 Šimík R.

1 2025

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Částice náhodou a snad ve zjišťovacích otázkách