13.3208, Disc: What is a Question?

[LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List:  Vol-13-3208. Thu Dec 5 2002. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 13.3208, Disc: What is a Question?

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=================================Directory=================================

1)
Date:  Thu, 5 Dec 2002 08:04:31 -0800 (PST)
From:  "Ahmad R. Lotfi" <arlotfi at yahoo.com>
Subject:  Disc. What is a question?

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Thu, 5 Dec 2002 08:04:31 -0800 (PST)
From:  "Ahmad R. Lotfi" <arlotfi at yahoo.com>
Subject:  Disc. What is a question?

Bruce wrote:

> This sentence (yes/no interrogative) has the rising question
> intonation. The wh-interrogative, as you say, makes myriad
> replies possible. The request is to supply additional
> information.  The intonation is that of a normal statement. It

> is the "wh-word" that specifies the expected form of the
> reply.  It is not asking for a truth value.  The yes-no
> interrogative does that.

Although a wh-question is not characterised with a rising
intonation but a falling one like a declarative, the wh-word
itself is still distinctly marked with high pitch. In my
original posting I'd characterised questions with high pitch
rather than rising intonation, which applies to the whole
sentence.

> It also appears that, beyond what may be relayed by intonation
> and context, there are probably no hard-and-fast rules to
> determine the pragmatic force of a particular syntactic form.


And possibly no critical properties defining some sort of
digital membership for the catgory of questions either!
Following Rosch (1975)in her characterisation of membership in a
category NOT as an all-or-none phenomenon (digital membership)
but an analog one with a prototype as "clearest cases, best
examples of the category", one may also characterise--perhaps
reluctantly for a formalist syntactician like me practicing
binarism in most of his formal representations of language--a
question with a prototypical high-pitch request for information
concerning the truth values of a set of propositions.

Regards,

Ahmad R. Lotfi, Ph. D
Department of English Language
Graduate School
Azad University
Esfahan, IRAN

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