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A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from , which are the grammar forms, typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be considered questions, as they are not expected to be answered.
Questions come in a number of varieties. For instance, are those such as the English language 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 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 of interrogatives, and are typically identified as sets of the which answer them.
At the level of semantics, a question is defined by its ability to establish a set of logically possible answers.Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey K. Pullum. (2002) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .
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 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.
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 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 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:
(a special case of ), 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 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.
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, the same question may have either interpretation:
In English, these are typically embodied in 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.
In English grammar, German grammar, French grammar 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 Do-support, as in:
In many languages, including English and most other European languages, the interrogative phrase must (with certain exceptions such as echo questions) appear at 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:
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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 grammar czy.
Other languages use verbal morphology, such as the -n verbal postfix in the Tunica language.
Of the languages examined in the World Atlas of Language Structures, only one, Atatláhuca–San Miguel Mixtec, was found to have no distinction between declaratives and polar questions.
In some languages, such as English, or Russian, 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.Paul Warren (2017) "The interpretation of prosodic variability in the context of accompanying sociophonetic cues", Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, 8(1), 11. (Paper presented at the Third Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Prosody workshop)
However it is established that in English there is a distinction between assertive rising declaratives and inquisitive rising declaratives, distinguished by their prosody.
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 a complex question. Consider a statement
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.Stanley Peters, "Speaker commitments: Presupposition", Proceedings of the Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference (SALT) 26: 1083–1098, 2016, ( (download PDF))
In Spanish language 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 the function of the question mark and the exclamation mark.
i. (a) Yes.
(b) She's ready.
(c) No, she's not.
ii. (a) I don't know.
(b) Why do you ask?
(c) She might be.
iii.(a) She's still looking for her wallet.
(b) She wasn't expecting you before 5 o'clock.
(c) I'll let you know when she's ready.
Only 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 implicature 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 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 the question.Nuel Belnap & T.B. Steel Jr. (1976) The Logic of Questions and Answers, pages 3, 12 & 13, Yale University Press
A similar ambiguous question in English is "Do you mind if...?" The responder may reply unambiguously "Yes, I do mind," if they do mind, or "No, I don't mind," if they do not, but a simple "No" or "Yes" answer can lead to confusion, as a single "No" can seem like a "Yes, I do mind" (as in "No, please don't do that"), and a "Yes" can seem like a "No, I don't mind" (as in "Yes, go ahead"). An easy way to bypass this confusion would be to ask a non-negative question, such as "Is it all right with you if...?"
Some languages have different particles (for example the French language " si", the German language " doch" or the Swedish language, Danish language, and Norwegian " jo") to answer negative questions (or negative statements) in an affirmative way; they provide a means to express contradiction.
A widespread and accepted use of questions in an educational context is the assessment of students' knowledge through .
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