A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammatical forms, typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be considered bona fide questions, as they are not expected to be answered. Questions come in a number of varieties. For instance, polar questions are those such as the English example "Is this a polar question?", which can be answered with "yes" or "no". Alternative questions such as "Is this a polar question, or an alternative question?" present a list of possibilities to choose from. Open questions such as "What kind of question is this?" allow many possible resolutions. Questions are widely studied in linguistics and philosophy of language. In the subfield of pragmatics, questions are regarded as illocutionary acts which raise an issue to be resolved in discourse. In approaches to formal semantics such as alternative semantics or inquisitive semantics, questions are regarded as the denotations of interrogatives, and are typically identified as sets of the propositions which answer them.
Definitions
Linguistically, a question may be defined on three levels. At the level of semantics, a question is defined by its ability to establish a set of logically possible answers. At the level of pragmatics, a question is an illocutionary category of speech act which seeks to obtain information from the addressee. At the level of syntax, the interrogative is a type of clause which is characteristically associated with questions, and defined by certain grammatical rules (such as subject–auxiliary inversion in English) which vary by language. Some authors conflate these definitions. While prototypical questions (such as "What is your name?") will satisfy all three definitions, their overlap is not complete. For example "I would like to know your name." satisfies the pragmatic definition, but not the semantic or syntactic ones. Such mismatches of form and function are called indirect speech acts.
Uses
The principal use of questions is to elicit information from the person being addressed by indicating the information which the speaker (or writer) desires. A slight variant is the display question, where the addressee is asked to produce information which is already known to the speaker. For example, a teacher or game show host might ask "What is the capital of Australia?" to test the knowledge of a student or contestant. A direction question is one that seeks an instruction rather than factual information. It differs from a typical ("information") question in that the characteristic response is a directive rather than a declarative statement. For example:
A: When should I open your gift? B: Open it now. Questions may also be used as the basis for a number of indirect speech acts. For example, the imperative sentence "Pass the salt." can be reformulated (somewhat more politely) as:
Would you pass the salt? Which has the form of an interrogative, but the illocutionary force of a directive. The term rhetorical question may be colloquially applied to a number of uses of questions where the speaker does not seek or expect an answer (perhaps because the answer is implied or obvious), such as:
Has he lost his mind? Why have I brought you all here? Let me explain... They're closed? But the website said it was open until 10 o'clock. Loaded questions (a special case of complex questions), such as "Have you stopped beating your wife?" may be used as a joke or to embarrass an audience, because any answer a person could give would imply more information than he was willing to affirm.
Semantic classification The main semantic classification of questions is according to the set of logically possible answers that they admit. An open question, such as "What is your name?", allows indefinitely many possible answers. A closed question admits a finite number of possible answers. Closed questions may be further subdivided into yes–no questions (such as "Are you hungry?") and alternative questions (such as "Do you want jam or marmalade?"). The distinction between these classes tends to be grammaticalized. In English, open and closed interrogatives are distinct clause types characteristically associated with open and closed questions, respectively.
Yes–no questions
A yes–no question (also called a polar question, or general question) asks whether some statement is true. They can, in principle be answered by a "yes" or "no" (or similar words or expressions in other languages). Examples include "Do you take sugar?", "Should they be believed?" and "Will you come to the party tonight?"
Alternative questions An alternative question presents two or more discrete choices as possible answers in an assumption that only one of them is true. For example:
Are you supporting England, Ireland or Wales? The canonical expected answer to such a question would be either "England", "Ireland", or "Wales". Such an alternative question presupposes that the addressee supports one of these three teams. The addressee may cancel this presupposition with an answer like "None of them". In English, alternative questions are not syntactically distinguished from yes–no questions. Depending on context, the same question may have either interpretation:
Do these muffins have butter or margarine? [I'm on a low fat diet.] Do these muffins have butter or margarine? [I saw that the recipe said you could use either.] In speech, these are distinguishable by intonation, i.e., the question is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "butter" and a falling contour on "margarine".
Open questions An open question (also called a variable question, open-ended question, non-polar question, or special question) admits indefinitely many possible answers. For example:
Where should we go for lunch? In English, these are typically embodied in a closed interrogative clause, which uses an interrogative word such as when, who, or what. These are also called wh-words, and for this reason open questions may also be called wh-questions.
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