Abstract
The paper agues that none of the known approaches to questions does justice to the meaning of questions. It will be shown that they all fail in several respects. The paper argues that the meaning of questions is essentially a matter of pragmatics.
The present paper is in part based on my earlier work on questions and answers. Cf. Kiefer (1980, 1981, 1988).
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Notes
- 1.
Formal accounts of question still seem to prefer the propositional approach over other possible approaches. Cf., for example, Lappin et al. (2015).
- 2.
For some logicians ‘open wh-questions’ constitute a separate class of questions. It is interesting to see that logical approaches to the semantics of questions are typically restricted to wh-questions which do not belong to the‘open’ class quetions in terms of the Polish School.
- 3.
Cf. Searle (1975).
- 4.
For an earlier formulation of this scheme cf. Kiefer (1980): 116.
References
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Kiefer, F. (2016). On the Meaning of Questions. In: Allan, K., Capone, A., Kecskes, I. (eds) Pragmemes and Theories of Language Use. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43491-9_8
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