A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information . Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives , which are the grammatical forms, typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions , for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be considered bona fide questions, as they are not expected to be answered.
25-421: Questioning is a major form of human thought and interpersonal communication. It involves employing a series of questions to explore an issue, an idea or something intriguing. Questioning is the process of forming and wielding that serves to develop answers and insight. Questioning may also refer to: Question Questions come in a number of varieties. For instance; Polar questions are those such as
50-482: A complex question . Consider a statement and several questions related to it. As compared with: Unlike (B), questions (C) and (D) incorporate a presupposition that somebody killed the cat. Question (C) indicates speaker's commitment to the truth of the statement that somebody killed the cat, but no commitment as to whether John did it or did not. In languages written in Latin , Cyrillic or certain other scripts,
75-429: A polar question , or general question ) asks whether some statement is true. They can, in principle be answered by a "yes" or "no" (or similar words or expressions in other languages). Examples include "Do you take sugar?", "Should they be believed?" and "Am I the loneliest person in the world?" An alternative question presents two or more discrete choices as possible answers in an assumption that only one of them
100-429: A question mark at the end of a sentence identifies questions in writing. As with intonation, this feature is not restricted to sentences having the grammatical form of questions – it may also indicate a sentence's pragmatic function. In Spanish an additional inverted mark is placed at the beginning: ¿Cómo está usted? "How are you?". An uncommon variant of the question mark is the interrobang (‽), which combines
125-456: A rising declarative is a sentence which is syntactically declarative but is understood as a question by the use of a rising intonation. For example, "You're not using this?" On the other hand, there are English dialects (Southern Californian English, New Zealand English) in which rising declaratives (the " uptalk ") do not constitute questions. However it is established that in English there
150-522: A closed interrogative clause, which uses an interrogative word such as when , who , or what . These are also called wh -words, and for this reason open questions may also be called wh -questions. Questions may be marked by some combination of word order, morphology , interrogative words, and intonation . Where languages have one or more clause type characteristically used to form questions, they are called interrogative clauses. Open and closed questions are generally distinguished grammatically, with
175-448: A number of uses of questions where the speaker does not seek or expect an answer (perhaps because the answer is implied or obvious), such as: Loaded questions (a special case of complex questions ), such as "Have you stopped beating your wife?" may be used as a joke or to embarrass an audience, because any answer a person could give would imply more information than he was willing to affirm. The main semantic classification of questions
200-471: A typical ("information") question in that the characteristic response is a directive rather than a declarative statement. For example: Questions may also be used as the basis for a number of indirect speech acts. For example, the imperative sentence "Pass the salt." can be reformulated (somewhat more politely) as: Which has the form of an interrogative, but the illocutionary force of a directive. The term rhetorical question may be colloquially applied to
225-477: Is a distinction between assertive rising declaratives and inquisitive rising declaratives, distinguished by their prosody . Questions may be phrased as a request for confirmation for a statement the interrogator already believes to be true. A tag question is a polar question formed by the addition of an interrogative fragment (the "tag") to a (typically declarative) clause. For example: This form may incorporate speaker's presupposition when it constitutes
250-636: Is according to the set of logically possible answers that they admit. An open question, such as "What is your name?", allows indefinitely many possible answers. A closed question admits a finite number of possible answers. Closed questions may be further subdivided into yes–no questions (such as "Are you hungry?") and alternative questions (such as "Do you want jam or marmalade?"). The distinction between these classes tends to be grammaticalized. In English, open and closed interrogatives are distinct clause types characteristically associated with open and closed questions, respectively. A yes–no question (also called
275-511: Is one of a small number of languages which use word order. Another example is French: Cross-linguistically, the most common method of marking a polar question is with an interrogative particle , such as the Japanese か ka , Mandarin 吗 ma and Polish czy . Other languages use verbal morphology, such as the -n verbal postfix in the Tunica language . Of the languages examined in
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#1732780013272300-419: Is true. For example: The canonical expected answer to such a question would be either "England", "Ireland", or "Wales". Such an alternative question presupposes that the addressee supports one of these three teams. The addressee may cancel this presupposition with an answer like "None of them". In English, alternative questions are not syntactically distinguished from yes–no questions. Depending on context,
325-402: Is your name?") will satisfy all three definitions, their overlap is not complete. For example "I would like to know your name." satisfies the pragmatic definition, but not the semantic or syntactic ones. Such mismatches of form and function are called indirect speech acts . The principal use of questions is to elicit information from the person being addressed by indicating the information which
350-458: The English example "Is this a polar question?", which can be answered with "yes" or "no" . Alternative questions such as "Is this a polar question, or an alternative question?" present a list of possibilities to choose from. Open questions such as "What kind of question is this?" allow many possible resolutions. Questions are widely studied in linguistics and philosophy of language . In
375-543: The World Atlas of Language Structures , only one, Atatláhuca–San Miguel Mixtec , was found to have no distinction between declaratives and polar questions. Most languages have an intonational pattern which is characteristic of questions (often involving a raised pitch at the end, as in English). In some languages, such as Italian , intonation is the sole distinction. In some languages, such as English, or Russian,
400-475: The [i] responses are answers in the Cambridge sense. The responses in [ii] avoid committing to a yes or no answer. The responses in [iii] all implicate an answer of no , but are not logically equivalent to no . (For example, in [iiib], the respondent can cancel the implicature by adding a statement like: "Fortunately, she packed everything up early.") Along similar lines, Belnap and Steel (1976) define
425-418: The beginning of the sentence, a phenomenon known as wh-fronting . In other languages, the interrogative appears in the same position as it would in a corresponding declarative sentence ( in situ ). A question may include multiple variables as in: Different languages may use different mechanisms to distinguish polar ("yes-no") questions from declarative statements (in addition to the question mark ). English
450-441: The concept of a direct answer : A direct answer to a given question is a piece of language that completely, but just completely, answers the question...What is crucial is that it be effectively decidable whether a piece of language is a direct answer to a specific question... To each clear question there corresponds a set of statements which are directly responsive. ... A direct answer must provide an unarguably final resolution of
475-402: The former identified by the use of interrogative words . In English , German , French and various other (mostly European) languages, both forms of interrogative are subject to an inversion of word order between verb and subject. In English, the inversion is limited to auxiliary verbs , which sometimes necessitates the addition of the auxiliary do , as in: Open questions are formed by
500-507: The function of the question mark and the exclamation mark . The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language distinguishes between an answer (being a member of the set of logically possible answers, as delineated in § Semantic classification ) and a response (any statement made by the addressee in reply to the question). For example, the following are all possible responses to the question "Is Alice ready to leave?" Only
525-582: The level of semantics , a question is defined by its ability to establish a set of logically possible answers. At the level of pragmatics , a question is an illocutionary category of speech act which seeks to obtain information from the addressee. At the level of syntax , the interrogative is a type of clause which is characteristically associated with questions, and defined by certain grammatical rules (such as subject–auxiliary inversion in English) which vary by language. Some authors conflate these definitions. While prototypical questions (such as "What
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#1732780013272550-457: The same question may have either interpretation: In speech, these are distinguishable by intonation , i.e., the question is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "butter" and a falling contour on "margarine". An open question (also called a variable question , non-polar question , or special question ) admits indefinitely many possible answers. For example: In English, these are typically embodied in
575-413: The speaker (or writer) desires. A slight variant is the display question , where the addressee is asked to produce information which is already known to the speaker. For example, a teacher or game show host might ask "What is the capital of Australia?" to test the knowledge of a student or contestant. A direction question is one that seeks an instruction rather than factual information. It differs from
600-433: The subfield of pragmatics , questions are regarded as illocutionary acts which raise an issue to be resolved in discourse . In approaches to formal semantics such as alternative semantics or inquisitive semantics , questions are regarded as the denotations of interrogatives, and are typically identified as sets of the propositions which answer them. Linguistically, a question may be defined on three levels. At
625-421: The use of interrogative words such as, in English, when , what , or which . These stand in as variables representing the unknown information being sought. They may also combine with other words to form interrogative phrases, such as which shoes in: In many languages, including English and most other European languages, the interrogative phrase must (with certain exceptions such as echo questions ) appear at
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