Question

For other uses, seeQuestion (disambiguation).

"Asking" redirects here. For the song by Sonny Fodera and MK, seeAsking (song).

A question mark made of smaller question marks

Aquestionis anutterancewhich serves as a request forinformation.Questions are sometimes distinguished frominterrogatives,which are thegrammaticalforms, typically used to express them.Rhetorical questions,for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be consideredbona fidequestions, as they are not expected to be answered.

Questions come in a number of varieties. For instance;Polar questionsare those such as theEnglishexample "Is this a polar question?", which can be answered with "yes" or "no".Alternative questionssuch as "Is this a polar question, or an alternative question?" present a list of possibilities to choose from.Open questionssuch as "What kind of question is this?" allow many possible resolutions.

Questions are widely studied inlinguisticsandphilosophy of language.In the subfield ofpragmatics,questions are regarded asillocutionary actswhich raise an issue to be resolved indiscourse.In approaches toformal semanticssuch asalternative semanticsorinquisitive semantics,questions are regarded as thedenotationsof interrogatives, and are typically identified assetsof thepropositionswhich answer them.

Definitions

Linguistically, a question may be defined on three levels.

At the level ofsemantics,a question is defined by its ability to establish a set of logically possible answers.

At the level ofpragmatics,a question is anillocutionarycategory of speech act which seeks to obtain information from the addressee.

At the level ofsyntax,theinterrogativeis a type of clause which is characteristically associated with questions, and defined by certain grammatical rules (such assubject–auxiliary inversionin 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 calledindirect speech acts.

Uses

A man asking a woman a question

The principal use of questions is to elicit information from the person being addressed by indicating the information which the speaker (or writer) desires.

A slight variant is thedisplay 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:

A: When should I open your gift?

B: Open it now.

Questions may also be used as the basis for a number of indirect speech acts. For example, theimperative sentence"Pass the salt." can be reformulated (somewhat more politely) as:

Would you pass the salt?

Which has the form of an interrogative, but the illocutionary force of a directive.

The termrhetorical questionmay 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:

Has he lost his mind?

Why have I brought you all here? Let me explain...

They're closed? But the website said it was open until 10 o'clock.

Loaded questions(a special case ofcomplex 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.

Semantic classification

The main semantic classification of questions 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 closedinterrogativesare distinct clause types characteristically associated with open and closed questions, respectively.

Yes–no questions

Main article:Yes–no question

Ayes–no question(also called apolar question,orgeneral 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?"

Alternative questions

Analternative questionpresents two or more discrete choices as possible answers in an assumption that only one of them is true. For example:

Are you supporting England, Ireland or Wales?

The canonical expected answer to such a question would be either "England", "Ireland", or "Wales". Such an alternative questionpresupposesthat the addressee supports one of these three teams. The addressee maycancelthis 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:

• Do these muffins have butter or margarine? [I'm on a low fat diet.]
• Do these muffins have butter or margarine? [I saw that the recipe said you could use either.]

In speech, these are distinguishable by intonation.

Open questions

Anopen question(also called avariable question,non-polar question,orspecial question) admits indefinitely many possible answers. For example:

Where should we go for lunch?

In English, these are typically embodied in a closed interrogative clause, which uses aninterrogative wordsuch aswhen,who,orwhat.These are also calledwh-words, and for this reason open questions may also be calledwh-questions.

Question formation

Questions may be marked by some combination of word order,morphology,interrogative words, andintonation.Where languages have one or moreclausetype characteristically used to form questions, they are calledinterrogativeclauses. Open and closed questions are generally distinguished grammatically, with the former identified by the use ofinterrogative words.

InEnglish,German,Frenchand various other (mostly European) languages, both forms of interrogative are subject to aninversionof word order between verb and subject. In English, the inversionis limited to auxiliary verbs,which sometimes necessitatesthe addition of the auxiliarydo,as in:

a. Sam reads the newspaper.- Statement

b. Does Sam read the newspaper?- Yes–no question formed using inversion anddo-support

Open questions

Open questions are formed by the use ofinterrogative wordssuch as, in English,when,what,orwhich.These stand in as variables representing the unknown information being sought. They may also combine with other words to form interrogative phrases, such aswhich shoesin:

Which shoes should I wear to the party?

In many languages, including English and most other European languages, the interrogative phrase must (with certain exceptions such asecho questions) appear at the beginning of the sentence, a phenomenon known aswh-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:

Whose gifts are in which boxes?

Polar questions

Different languages may use different mechanisms to distinguish polar ( "yes-no" ) questions from declarative statements (in addition to thequestion mark). English is one of a small number of languages which use word order. Another example is French:

	French	Translation
Declarative	Vous avez tué un oiseau.	You have killed a bird.
Polar question	Avez-vous tué un oiseau?	Have you killed a bird?

Cross-linguistically, the most common method of marking a polar question is with aninterrogative particle,such as theJapaneseかka,MandarinMạmaandPolishczy.

Other languages use verbal morphology, such as the-nverbal postfix in theTunica language.

Of the languages examined in theWorld Atlas of Language Structures,only one,Atatláhuca–San Miguel Mixtec,was found to have no distinction between declaratives and polar questions.

Intonation

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 asItalian,intonation is the sole distinction.

In some languages, such as English, or Russian, arising declarativeis 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 Englishthere is a distinctionbetweenassertiverising declaratives andinquisitiverising declaratives, distinguished by theirprosody.

Request for confirmation and speaker presupposition

Questions may be phrased as a request for confirmation for a statement the interrogator already believes to be true.

Atag questionis a polar question formed by the addition of an interrogative fragment (the "tag" ) to a (typically declarative) clause. For example:

You're John,aren't you?

Let's have a drink,shall we?

You remembered the eggs,right?

This form may incorporate speaker'spresuppositionwhen it constitutes acomplex question. Consider a statement

(A) Somebody killed the cat

and several questions related to it.

(B) John killed the cat, did he? (tag question)

(C) Was it John who killed the cat?

As compared with:

(D) Who killed the cat?

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.

Punctuation

In languages written inLatin,Cyrillicor certain other scripts, aquestion markat 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'spragmaticfunction.

InSpanishan additionalinverted markis placed at the beginning:¿Cómo está usted?"How are you?". An uncommon variant of the question mark is theinterrobang(‽), which combines the function of the question mark and theexclamation mark.

Responses and answers

See also:Yes–no question § Answers,andAnswer ellipsis

TheCambridge Grammar of the English Languagedistinguishes between ananswer(being a member of the set of logically possible answers, as delineated in§ Semantic classification) and aresponse(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?"

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 ayesornoanswer. The responses in [iii] allimplicatean answer ofno,but are not logically equivalent tono.(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 adirect 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 aredirectlyresponsive.... A direct answer must provide an unarguably final resolution of the question.

Answering negative questions

Main article:Yes and no

"Negative questions" are interrogative sentences which contain negation in their phrasing, such as "Shouldn't you be working?" These can have different ways of expressing affirmation and denial from the standard form of question, and they can be confusing, since it is sometimes unclear whether the answer should be the opposite of the answer to the non-negated question. For example, if one does not have a passport, both "Do you have a passport?" and "Don't you have a passport?" are properly answered with "No", despite apparently asking opposite questions. The Japanese and Korean languages avoid this ambiguity. Answering "No" to the second of these in Japanese or Korean would mean, "Idohave a passport ".

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 theFrench"si",theGerman"doch"or theSwedish,Danish,andNorwegian"jo") to answer negative questions (or negative statements) in an affirmative way; they provide a means to express contradiction.

Indirect questions

As well as direct questions (such asWhere are my keys?), there also existindirect questions(also calledinterrogative content clauses), such aswhere my keys are.These are used assubordinate clausesin sentences such as "I wonder where my keys are" and "Ask him where my keys are." Indirect questions do not necessarily follow the same rules of grammar as direct questions.For example, in English and some other languages, indirect questions are formed without inversion of subject and verb (compare the word order in "where are they?" and "(I wonder) where they are" ). Indirect questions may also be subject to the changes oftenseand other changes that apply generally toindirect speech.

Learning

Questions are used from the most elementary stage of learning to original research. In thescientific method,a question often forms the basis of the investigation and can be considered a transition between the observation and hypothesis stages. Students of all ages use questions in their learning of topics, and the skill of having learners creating "investigatable" questions is a central part ofinquiry education.TheSocratic methodof questioning student responses may be used by a teacher to lead the student towards the truth without direct instruction, and also helps students to form logical conclusions.

A widespread and accepted use of questions in an educational context is the assessment of students' knowledge throughexams.

Origins

Enculturated apesKanzi,Washoe,Sarahand a few others who underwent extensive language training programs (with the use of gestures and other visual forms of communications) successfully learned toanswerquite complex questions and requests (including question words "who", "what", "where" ), although so far they have failed to learn how toask questions themselves.For example,David and Anne Premackwrote: "Though she [Sarah] understood the question, she did not herself ask any questions — unlike the child who asks interminable questions, such as What that? Who making noise? When Daddy come home? Me go Granny's house? Where puppy? Sarah never delayed the departure of her trainer after her lessons by asking where the trainer was going, when she was returning, or anything else".The ability to ask questions is often assessed in relation to comprehension ofsyntactic structures.It is widely accepted that the first questions are asked by humans during their early infancy, at the pre-syntactic, one word stage oflanguage development,with the use of questionintonation.

See also

• Curiosity
• Erotetics,the logic of questions and answers
• Inquiry
• Interrogation
• Interrogative word
• Inquisitive semantics
• Leading question
• Question under discussion
• Sentence function
• Squiggle operator
• Confusion
• Who Asked the First Question?,a book

Further reading

• Berti, Enrico.Soggetti di responsabilita: questioni di filosofia pratica,Reggio Emilia, 1993.
• Fieser, James; Lillegard, Norman (eds.). Philosophical questions: readings and interactive guides, 2005.
• Hamblin, C.L. "Questions", in: Paul Edwards (ed.),Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Muratta Bunsen, Eduardo. "Lo erotico en la pregunta", in: Aletheia 5 (1999), 65–74.
• Stahl, George. "Un développement de la logique des questions", in: Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Etranger 88 (1963), 293–301.
• Smith, Joseph Wayne. Essays on ultimate questions: critical discussions of the limits of contemporary philosophical inquiry, Aldershot: Avebury, 1988.