Asking Questions Using meaningful structures to imply ignorance [Hardcover]

Asking Questionsexamines 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. Robert Fiengo not only does this, but 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, Fiengo challenges the use theorist to acknowledge the importance of grammatical form and the grammarian to acknowledge the importance of use. In addition to developing an Austinian distinction between four questioning speech-acts, and a proposal concerning the philosophy of language,Asking Questionscontains a useful discussion of the type-token distinction and how use of language compares with use of other things. Fiengo 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.

Asking Questionsadvances our understanding of a wide range of issues in a number of important respects. Scholars and students of linguistics and philosophy will find plenty to interest them in this pioneering work.

1. Introduction: ignorance and incompleteness
2. The instrumental model of talking: how to talk about talk
3. Open questions, confirmation questions, and how to choose which sentence-type to use when asking them
4. Quantifiers, wh-expressions, and manners of interpretation
5. Syntactic structure
6. On the questioning speech-acts and the kinds of ignorance they address
References
Index

The distinguished linguist Robert Fiengo has produced a fascinating book.Asking Questions could almost be subtitled Eló>