In semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, a question under discussion (QUD) is a question which the interlocutors in a discourse are attempting to answer.
In many formal and computational theories of discourse, the QUD (or an ordered set of QUD's) is among the elements of a tuple called the conversational scoreboard which represents the current state of the conversation.
Craige Roberts introduced the concept of a QUD in 1996 in order to formalize conversational relevance and explain its consequences for information structure and focus marking.
It has subsequently become a staple of work in semantics and pragmatics, playing a role in analyses of disparate phenomena including donkey anaphora and presupposition projection.
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