Draft:Question semantics

Question semantics is the linguistic study of the meaning of questions and answers. Questions are a major area of research in the syntax-semantics interface.Template:Sfn

• Play as important of a role in semantics as they do in syntax.
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Overview

Questions are a major topic of research in formal semantics because they do not fit with the classic view of denotations as truth conditions.Template:Sfn An influential approach developed by Charles HamblinTemplate:Sfn and Lauri KarttunenTemplate:Sfn defines the meaning of a question as the set of possible answers to that question.

What is a question?

Dayal .... speech act:Template:Snf

Template:SmallcapsSpeaker S questions Hearer H about proposition $p$ if and only if:

Types of questions and answers

Polar questions

A polar question (or yes-or-no question) is a question that asks whether a given proposition is true. For instance, the following English example can be answered with "yes" or "no", indicating whether or not Igor wrote a poemTemplate:Sfn

1. Did Igor write a POEM?

   a. Yes (Igor wrote a poem)

   b. No (Igor did not write a poem)

   i. No, Igor wrote a book.

2. Did Igor WRITE a poem?

   a. Yes (Igor wrote a poem)

   b. No (Igor did not write a poem)

   i. No, Igor read a poem.

3. Did IGOR write a poem?

   a. Yes (Igor wrote a poem)

   b. No (Igor did not write a poem)

   i. No, John wrote a poem.

Alternative questions

An alternative question is a question that asks which of several possibilities is true. For instance, the following English example can be answered with "a poem", "a book", but not with "yes" or "no". In this data sentence, the symbols "↑" and "↓" mark a rising and falling intonation contours respectively.Template:Sfnm

1. Did Igor write a POEM↑ or a BOOK↓? (alternative question)

Alternative questions are generally constructed using disjunction. However, additional ingredients such as focus, intonation, and particles are often necessary to distinguish them from other kinds of questions.

1. Did Igor write [a POEM or a BOOK]↑? (polar question)

Wh-questions

Questions which include wh words- such as "who", "what", "where", "whether" and "if"- at the beginning of the clause are called wh-questions. "Whether" and "if" only appear in indirect questions, and do not appear alongside other interrogative words such as "who" or "where". Questions may include multiple wh-words as shown in the English example below

1. Who is going where?

Conditional questions

Conditional questions are questions embedded in the consequent of a conditional. Conditional questions can be indicative or counterfactual as shown by the English examples below.Template:Sfnm

1. If Rebecca paints her car, what colour will she paint it?
2. If Rebecca had painted her car, what colour would she have painted it?

Embedded questions

Questions can be embedded under propositional attitudes, speech reports, and other embedding predicates.Template:Sfnm

1. Maria knows whether Joel is coming to the party.
2. Maria knows whether Joel or Lisa is coming to the party.
3. Maria knows who is coming to the party.
4. Maria asked Martin where one can buy an Italian newspaper in Amsterdam.
5. Maria told Martin where one can buy an Italian newspaper in Amsterdam.

Rhetorical questions

Template:See also A rhetorical question is a persuasive device where a question is posed that expects no answer. Semantically, they do not differ from ordinary questions, and are instead differentiated based on context. The same question can be rhetorical or ordinary depending on context, however speakers intuit rhetorical questions as having semantic equivalence to a declarative statement.

Rhetorical questions can be marked by the preceding phrase "after all", a following "yet"-clause or by a Negative Polarity Item. Ordinary questions can be marked by the phrases "I’m really curious" or "I really don't know".

Approaches

Hamblin semantics

Alternative semantics is a framework in which expressions denote alternative sets, understood as sets of objects of the same semantic type. In the original version of the proposal, developed by Charles Leonard Hamblin in 1973, a question denotes the set of its possible answers. Thus, if $P$ and $Q$ are propositions, then $\{P,Q\}$ is the denotation of the question whether $P$ or $Q$ is true. In a notable modification proposed by Lauri Karttunen, this idea was revised so that a question denotes the set of its true answers at the world of evaluation.Template:Sfn

Inquisitive semantics

Inquisitive semantics is a framework for question semantics which follows Hamblin in treating questions denotations as sets of propositions. However, it departs from Hamblin semantics in two fundamental ways. First, it is more restrictive in that it requires that denotations be nonempty and downward closed. For example, where Hamblin semantics would posit a denotation containing only the two propositions $P$ and $Q$, inquisitive semantics would posit a denotation containing those propositions and all of their subsets. Second, inquisitive semantics attributes denotations of this sort to all expressions, not just question-denoting ones. For example, where Hamblin semantics would follow traditional semantics in assigning a declarative clause the denotation $P$, inquisitive semantics would assign it the set containing $P$ and all of its subsets.

History

Charles HamblinTemplate:Sfn

See also

• Focus
• wh-movement

Bibliography

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Further reading

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