The role of preferred outcomes in determining implicit questioning strategies

Abstract

We look at a particular class of indirect answers to yes/no questions, where the speaker supposes that the hearer’s question was motivated by some underlying goal and aims to provide the hearer with an alternative way of accomplishing it. We posit that the questions in these cases are sub-questions in an implicit questioning strategy which is anchored to the hearer’s goal, and which must be inferred probabilistically by the speaker. The use of these implicit questioning strategies is licensed when the hearer has a preferred outcome, i.e., better and worse ways to accomplish her goal. We formally model the generation and interpretation of questions and answers in this context as a Bayesian game.