This paper develops an argument that discourse considerations are crucial in the semantics of questions by looking at the case of English “or what” questions. We argue that “what” in these questions is a discourse pronoun anaphoric with the ‘Question Under Discussion’, and show that this account explains the range of variation in how “or what” questions are interpreted in context, compared to other question types. This accounts for the fact that OWQs can be used as plain information seeking questions, as rhetorical questions, and also as questions that express insistence about receiving an immediate answer. Along the way we present empirical arguments that “or what” questions do not involve sluicing, though they can best be compared to the ...
Rhetorical questions (RQs) differ from information-seeking questions (ISQs) in that they do not requ...
Research in NLP has mainly focused on factoid questions, with the goal of finding quick and reliable...
In this paper I discuss the role that question contents should play in an overall account of languag...
In this chapter we give an overview of the research area which studies the meaning of questions. We ...
Rhetorical questions (RhQs) are puzzling for theoretical accounts of questions: while they have an i...
The paper describes questions as a syntactic, semantic and discourse category and reviews research o...
The analysis of French ‘what’ questions poses a number of difficulties. These questions exhibit nume...
features of the discourse marker say using a large corpus of naturally occurring data. In so doing, ...
This paper aims to explore whether some rhetorical questions contain certain linguistic elements or ...
This paper tackles the issue of how best to represent syntactically English how pseudo-questions (HP...
Asking and answering questions is a staple of human communication. To answer a question effectively,...
In a real-world setting, questions are not asked in isolation, but rather in a cohesive manner that ...
Questions in spoken dialogues are often uttered in a declarative form. Since more than 50% of these ...
An axiom of philosophical hermeneutics is that questioning has hermeneutic priority. Yet there are m...
Research on questions has shown that in the majοrity of cases the meaning of questions has been link...
Rhetorical questions (RQs) differ from information-seeking questions (ISQs) in that they do not requ...
Research in NLP has mainly focused on factoid questions, with the goal of finding quick and reliable...
In this paper I discuss the role that question contents should play in an overall account of languag...
In this chapter we give an overview of the research area which studies the meaning of questions. We ...
Rhetorical questions (RhQs) are puzzling for theoretical accounts of questions: while they have an i...
The paper describes questions as a syntactic, semantic and discourse category and reviews research o...
The analysis of French ‘what’ questions poses a number of difficulties. These questions exhibit nume...
features of the discourse marker say using a large corpus of naturally occurring data. In so doing, ...
This paper aims to explore whether some rhetorical questions contain certain linguistic elements or ...
This paper tackles the issue of how best to represent syntactically English how pseudo-questions (HP...
Asking and answering questions is a staple of human communication. To answer a question effectively,...
In a real-world setting, questions are not asked in isolation, but rather in a cohesive manner that ...
Questions in spoken dialogues are often uttered in a declarative form. Since more than 50% of these ...
An axiom of philosophical hermeneutics is that questioning has hermeneutic priority. Yet there are m...
Research on questions has shown that in the majοrity of cases the meaning of questions has been link...
Rhetorical questions (RQs) differ from information-seeking questions (ISQs) in that they do not requ...
Research in NLP has mainly focused on factoid questions, with the goal of finding quick and reliable...
In this paper I discuss the role that question contents should play in an overall account of languag...