The study of questions

Asking questions is a fundamental aspect of human nature. Languages all around the world encode interrogative constructions. It is therefore incumbent upon semanticists to capture the meaning of questions. However, achieving this goal faces a challenge under a truth conditional approach to meaning, since questions cannot easily be assigned a truth value. Moreover, it is not sufficient to focus only on the questions themselves; one must also determine what counts as a felicitous and informative answer, and how this relates to a speaker's intention in posing a question in a discourse context. How then do semanticists approach an investigation of questions? In this article, we present the core issues inherent to question-answer dynamics, review the main approaches to question-answer meaning, highlight how questions are situated in a discourse context, and explore extensions of questions that highlight the connection between semantics, pragmatics, and human reasoning. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Linguistic Theory.