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On the Meaning of Questions

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Pragmemes and Theories of Language Use

Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 9))

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. 1.

    Formal accounts of question still seem to prefer the propositional approach over other possible approaches. Cf., for example, Lappin et al. (2015).

  2. 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. 3.

    Cf. Searle (1975).

  4. 4.

    For an earlier formulation of this scheme cf. Kiefer (1980): 116.

References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Ferenc Kiefer

Authors
  1. Ferenc Kiefer
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Correspondence to Ferenc Kiefer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Keith Allan

  2. Department of Cognitive Science, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Alessandro Capone

  3. State University of New York, Albany, New York, USA

    Istvan Kecskes

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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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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43491-9_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-43490-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-43491-9

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