5 A functional description of questions
Amy Tsui
INTRODUCTION
The term ‘question’ has been used in the linguistic and speech act literature
as though it is generally understood what a ‘question’ is. Unfortunately,
an examination of the studies on ‘questions’ shows that the term has never
been clearly defined. It has been used as a semantic category (see Quirk
et al. 1972, 1985), as an illocutionary act (see for example Lyons 1977,
1981; Huddleston 1984), and as a kind of ‘request’ or ‘directive’ (see for
example Katz 1977; Katz and Postal 1964; Gordon and Lakoff 1975; Labov
and Fanshel 1977; Burton 1980). Sometimes an utterance is identified as
a ‘question’ because it is interrogative in form and sometimes because it
expects an answer or some verbal performance from the addressee. In
other words, the term ‘question’ is sometimes taken as a syntactic category
and sometimes a discourse category; as a result, the term remains vague
and ill-defined. In what follows, I shall examine some of the studies of
‘questions’.
QUIRK et al.’s STUDY OF ‘QUESTIONS’
Let us start with the study of ‘questions’ by Quirk et al. (1972, 1985).^1
Quirk et al. define ‘questions’ as a semantic class which is primarily used
to seek information on a specific point (1985:804). They propose that there
are three major classes of ‘question’ according to the answer they expect
(1985:806):
1 Those that expect affirmation or negation, as in ‘Have you finished the
book?’ YES/NO questions.
2 Those that typically expect a reply from an open range of replies, as in
‘What is your name?’ or ‘How old are you?’ WH-questions.
3 Those that expect as the reply one of two or more options presented in
the question, as in ‘Would you like to go for a or stay at ?’
ALTERNATIVE questions.
Let us examine these three classes one by one.