This book examines a central phenomenon of language — the use of sentences to ask questions. Although there is a sizable literature on the syntax and semantics of interrogatives, the logic of ‘questions’, and the speech act of questioning, no one has tried to put the syntax and semantics together with the speech acts over the full range of phenomena we pretheoretically think of as asking questions. This book attempts to do this, and it also takes up some more foundational issues in the theory of language. By positioning the findings of contemporary grammatical theorizing within the larger doma ... More

This book examines a central phenomenon of language — the use of sentences to ask questions. Although there is a sizable literature on the syntax and semantics of interrogatives, the logic of ‘questions’, and the speech act of questioning, no one has tried to put the syntax and semantics together with the speech acts over the full range of phenomena we pretheoretically think of as asking questions. This book attempts to do this, and it also takes up some more foundational issues in the theory of language. By positioning the findings of contemporary grammatical theorizing within the larger domain of language use, this book makes some important challenges. It acknowledges the importance of grammatical form and the grammarian. In addition to developing an Austinian distinction between four questioning speech-acts, and a proposal concerning the philosophy of language, this book contains a discussion of the type-token distinction and how use of language compares with use of other things. The book also considers the nature of multiple questions, revealing what one must know to ask them, and what speech acts one may perform when asking them.