Question

In the subfield of pragmatics, questions are regarded as illocutionary acts which raise an issue to be resolved in discourse.

At the level of semantics, a question is defined by its ability to establish a set of logically possible answers.

[1] At the level of pragmatics, a question is an illocutionary category of speech act which seeks to obtain information from the addressee.

[1] 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.

[2] A slight variant is the display question, where the addressee is asked to produce information which is already known to the speaker.

It differs from a typical ("information") question in that the characteristic response is a directive rather than a declarative statement.

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.

The main semantic classification of questions is according to the set of logically possible answers that they admit.

An alternative question[5] presents two or more discrete choices as possible answers in an assumption that only one of them is true.

For example: The canonical expected answer to such a question would be either "England", "Ireland", or "Wales".

Open and closed questions are generally distinguished grammatically, with the former identified by the use of interrogative words.

They may also combine with other words to form interrogative phrases, such as which shoes in: In many languages, including English and most other European languages, the interrogative phrase must (with certain exceptions such as echo questions) appear at the beginning of the sentence, a phenomenon known as wh-fronting.

Another example is French: Cross-linguistically, the most common method of marking a polar question is with an interrogative particle,[7] such as the Japanese か ka, Mandarin 吗 ma and Polish czy.

[7] Most languages have an intonational pattern which is characteristic of questions (often involving a raised pitch at the end, as in English).

Questions may be phrased as a request for confirmation for a statement the interrogator already believes to be true.

For example: This form may incorporate speaker's presupposition when it constitutes a complex question.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language distinguishes between an answer (being a member of the set of logically possible answers, as delineated in § Semantic classification) and a response (any statement made by the addressee in reply to the question).

[1] For example, the following are all possible responses to the question "Is Alice ready to leave?"

(For example, in [iiib], the respondent can cancel the implicature by adding a statement like: "Fortunately, she packed everything up early.")

Some languages have different particles (for example the French "si", the German "doch" or the Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian "jo") to answer negative questions (or negative statements) in an affirmative way; they provide a means to express contradiction.

), there also exist indirect questions (also called interrogative content clauses), such as where my keys are.

[11] For example, in English and some other languages, indirect questions are formed without inversion of subject and verb (compare the word order in "where are they?"

In the scientific method, a question often forms the basis of the investigation and can be considered a transition between the observation and hypothesis stages.

A widespread and accepted use of questions in an educational context is the assessment of students' knowledge through exams.

[12] The ability to ask questions is often assessed in relation to comprehension of syntactic structures.