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26 Questions: Logic and
Interactions
Jonathan Ginzburg∗
King’s College London, Dept. of Computer Science, The Strand, London
WC2R2LS, UK, E-mail: jonathan.ginzburg@kcl.ac.uk
26.1 Overview
The early years of the twenty-first century have seen an increased interest in questions.
This is partly due to the rise of interest in interaction, where questions play a key role.
As components of context, they are significant actors in grammatical phenomena such
as ellipsis and focus. They are of fundamental importance in explicating inquiry and
of course in question answering.
This update to Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof’s Chapter 25 focuses on the
two main areas of recent logico-linguistic research on questions: first, the logic and
ontology of questions—what are questions and how do they relate to other seman-
tic entities? Second, questions in interaction—issues such as how questions affect
context, why questions get asked, what range of responses—not just answers—do
questions give rise to. The boundaries between these two areas is somewhat artificial
and, therefore, not easy to demarcate, particularly in an era where meanings are often
explicated in terms of context change. A brief indication of other research in the area
is provided before the concluding remarks.
26.2 The Ontology and Logic of Questions
Over the last decade work on the ontology and logic of questions can be grouped
into roughly three groups, though there is considerable variation in approach and
assumptions even within the groups. The first group bases itself on the continued
development of erotetic logic, a logic in which both questions and propositions can
figure in premises and conclusions of inference rules. The second approach, taking
the partition view of questions (Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1997) as its inspiration,
attempts to integrate questions and propositions in a logic which is minimally
∗I am grateful for comments received from Johan van Benthem, Jeroen Groenendijk, Alice ter Meulen, and
Andrzej Wi´
sniewski. Alice and Johan’s patience and encouragement has been of significant help.
Handbook of Logic and Language. DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-444-53726-3.00026-8
c
"2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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2 Handbook of Logic and Language
distinct from “standard” logics, primarily (a modalized) propositional logic. The third
approach associates interrogativity with the semantic operation of λ-abstraction.
26.2.1 Erotetic Logic
Work in erotetic logic stretches back to the Priors and Kubi´
nski in the 1950s. In recent
years it has been developed, particularly in works oriented towards applications in the
philosophy of science and inquiry, by Hintikka and his associates (see for example
papers collected in Hintikka, 1999) and works by Wi´
sniewski and his associates (see
for example Wi´
sniewski, 2001; Wi´
sniewski, 2003), which have similar applications
but also a somewhat more linguistic bent. For this reason I focus on the latter here.
The starting point of Inferential Erotetic Logic (IEL) is the mundane but typically
neglected observation that questions figure both as premises and as conclusions in
inference:
(1) a. Who should we invite to the conference? Clearly someone with an interesting research
agenda. But that raises the thorny issue of where we can find such a person.
b. Where should we go on holiday? Ideally somewhere closeby with a lot of sunshine.
Which raises the issue of whether there is such a place at all.
An erotetic inference, then, takes place when a question is concluded from premises
of declarative sentences and/or a question, and the task of IEL is to characterize (the
concept of) validity of such inferences. Basic notions the theory explicates are evoca-
tion of questions by sets of declaratives and implication of questions by sets of declar-
atives and questions. The logic distinguishes declaratives (d-wffs) and interrogatives
(e-wffs). In general, it adopts a non-reductionist view of questions, remains open to
various implementations thereof, as well as maintaining semantic flexibility, as long as
truth is definable for d-wffs. On the syntactic level, the formal language assigns to an
interrogative Qa set of sentences dQ which are its direct answers. A key component
of the analysis is the use of m(ultiple)-c(onclusion) entailment (Shoesmith and Smiley,
1978)—the truth of a set X of premises guarantees the truth of at least one conclusion.
MC-entailment helps define evocation and erotetic implication:
(2) X evokes a question Q iff X mc-entails dQ, the set of sentences which are the
direct answers of Q, but for no A∈dQ,X|= A
Erotetic implication involves each direct answer to the implied question together
with the premises mc-entailing a proper subset of the answers to the implying ques-
tion. So an implied question is potentially cognitively useful relative to the implying
question:
(3) A question Q implies a question Q1on the basis of a set of d-wffs X iff
!for each A∈dQ:X∪{A}mc −entailsdQ1
!for each B∈dQ1there exists a non-empty proper subset Y of dQ such that X∪{B}mc −
entailsY
This leads on to the notion of erotetic search scenario (Wi´
sniewski, 2003)—a clus-
ter of interrelated inference chains each of which starts with the same issue, proceeds
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Questions: Logic and Interactions 3
via a mix of classical deductive and erotetic inferences, and terminates with an answer.
The notions provided by IEL have applications that include the characterization of
inquiry, the semantics of why questions, the characterization of query responses in dia-
logue, and proof theory (see for example Leszczy´
nska-Jasion, 2009; Urbanski, 2001;
Wi´
sniewski et al., 2005).
26.2.2 Interrogativizing Propositional Logic
Over the last decade there have been a number of approaches that strive to integrate
questions in ways that require ‘minimal’ extensions to standard logics. Questions, on
these approaches, are of a similar semantic type to propositions, a strategy that brings
with it some clear advantages—as well as some risks.
Nelken and Francez (2002) develop an extensional (or as they later suggest quasi-
extensional) approach to interrogatives using a five-valued logic. This is achieved
by interpreting the meaning of questions as elements of type t, and re-interpreting
the domain of type t as a bilattice (Fitting, 1991; Ginsberg, 1990). The bilattice has
five truth values: in addition to the standard True and False, construed epistemically,
and the reasonably well known Unknown, it has two interrogatively-oriented values:
Resolved and Unresolved. Valuations can now be extended to epistemic and interrog-
ative operators Lφand ?φas follows:
(4) a. v(Lφ)=tif v(φ)=T;v(Lφ)=fif v(φ)∈{F,uk}
b. v(?φ)=rif v(φ)∈{T,F};v(?φ)=ur if v(φ)=uk
Answerhood, construed exhaustively, can be defined straightforwardly:
(5) panswers qif whenever pis assigned t,qis assigned r.
One potential pay-off for such an approach is that by extending the standard truth
tables it can provide a relatively simple—without for example the complex type rais-
ing of Groenendijk and Stokhof (1989)—account of Boolean operators that applies
uniformly to declaratives and interrogatives:
(6) a. The machine is broken or does it just need fuel?
b. If Millie didn’t break the vase, then who did?
Of course, with respect to natural language, such an account raises various issues—
for instance, why is there no negation of interrogatives or why does a hybrid as in
(7b), predicted to be interrogative, resist embedding by ‘wonder’? With respect to the
former, Nelken and Francez offer an interesting pragmatic explanation.
(7) a. #It is not the case whether Millie left.
b. # Bo wonders that Bo left but who arrived in his place. AQ:1
This general approach has been refined and extended in Nelken and Shan (2006).
Here the setting is first-order modal epistemic logic (with the spirit of Hintikka
and ˚
Aqvist hovering in the background). Questions are identified with (the knowl-
edge of) their exhaustive answerhood conditions, as in(8); though by appropriate
AQ1: Mo wonders that
Bo left but who arrived
in his place. (error was
in the original
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4 Handbook of Logic and Language
type raising the knowledge modality is abstracted over to allow questions to occur
embedded.
(8) a. ?p=def !p∨!¬p
b. ?x.p(x)=def ∀x!p(x)∨!¬p(x)
Nelken and Shan’s account extends the account of Nelken and Francez (2002),
without certain arguably problematic assumptions the latter require. Nelken and Shan
propose an interesting notion of question acceptability, building on Groenendijk’s
notion of licensing (see discussion in section 26.3) to predict what question meanings
are available in natural language:
(9) A question is acceptable in natural language only if it licenses a non-trivial answer.
That is, Q licenses ?A, where A is neither tautologically true nor tautologically
false.
This offers inter alia a novel explanation for the limited acceptability of disjoined
interrogatives (relating to earlier ideas of Grice (1989) and Simmons (2002)). An addi-
tional approach, which falls under the rubric of interrogativizing propositional logic,
is Inquisitive Semantics, which is discussed in section 26.3.
26.2.3 Questions as Propositional Abstracts
The view of questions as λ-abstracts (see for example Hull, 1975; Scha, 1983), a view
that fell out of the mainstream of linguistic semantics with the rise of the higher-order
view of questions, has been revived and generalized by Ginzburg and Sag (2000) and
by Krifka (2001).
One of the traditional attractions of identifying questions with abstracts has been
that they provide the requisite semantic apparatus for short answer resolution (Who
left? Bo; Did Bo leave? Yes, etc). However, therein also lies danger because this sug-
gests that, for example, unary wh-questions have the same semantic type as properties,
which seems counterintuitive given data such as (10):
(10) a. Some man is happy. So we know that happiness and manfulness are not incompat-
ible. # So we know that the question of who is happy and who is a man are not
incompatible.
b. A: What was Bill yesterday? B: Happy. B: #The question of who is happy.
Ginzburg and Sag (2000) develop their account within the situation theoretic-
motivated approach to ontology developed in Seligman and Moss (1997). The
structure they axiomatize, a Situational Universe with Abstract Entities (SU+AE),
involves propositions and other abstract semantic entities (e.g. outcomes—the deno-
tata of imperatives, facts—the denotata of exclamatives) being constructed in terms
of ‘concrete’ entities of the ontology such as situations and situation types. An
additional assumption made is that the semantic universe is closed under simulta-
neous abstraction, a semantic operation akin to λ-abstraction with one significant
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Questions: Logic and Interactions 5
extension: abstraction is over sets of elements, including the empty set. Moreover,
abstraction (including over the empty set) is potent—the body out of which abstraction
occurs is distinct from the abstract. Within such a setting propositions and situation
types are naturally distinguished and hence propositional abstracts—questions— are
not conflated with situation type abstracts—properties—and can be assigned a uniform
type. Polar questions are 0-ary abstracts, whereas wh-questions are n-ary abstracts
for n≥1. The fact that questions involve abstraction over propositions receives
empirical support from evidence concerning the distribution of in situ wh-phrases in
English, where proposition—denoting clauses are the sole environment out of which
wh-phrases allow (non-reprise) meanings to emerge.
In subsequent work, the reliance on the situation theoretic notion of abstraction has
been eliminated. Ginzburg (2005) shows how to formulate a theory of questions as
propositional abstracts in Type Theory with Records (TTR), a model theoretic offshoot
of Constructive Type Theory (Cooper, 2005), while using the standard TTR notion of
abstraction.
Ginzburg (1995) argued that exhaustiveness is an agent-specific notion and, con-
sequently, cannot serve as the semantic underpinning of questions. And yet, inter-
locuters can share intuitions about the coherence of responses to queries. Ginzburg
and Sag (2000) show how within an SU+AE propositional abstracts can be used
to characterize a wide range of notions of answerhood from strong exhaustiveness
through resolvedness—which underwrites the semantics of resolutive predicates—to
aboutness, needed to characterize intuitions concerning the coherence of responses to
queries. Thus, questions serve to underspecify answerhood.
The fact that propositions are constructed from situations and situation types has
a consequence that, in contrast to approaches where questions are characterized in
terms of exhaustive answerhood conditions, positive and negative polar interrogatives
are assigned distinct denotations. This means that the ontology can explicate the dis-
tinct presuppositional backgrounds associated with positive and negative polar inter-
rogatives (Hoepelmann, 1983) and can be linked to factuality conditions of negative
situation types (Cooper, 1998). These contextual differences gives rise in some lan-
guages, including French and Georgian, to distinct words to affirm a positive polar
question (oui, xo) and a negative polar question (si, diax). Nonetheless, given the def-
initions of answerhood available in this system, positive and negative interrogatives
specify identical answerhood relations.
Krifka (2001) develops an account of questions as propositional abstracts within a
structured meanings framework (Krifka, 1992). Krifka proposes question contents are
pairs <B,R>, with Ba propositional abstract and Ra domain for B, with ID and
NEG in (11b) denoting the identity and negation functions, respectively:
(11) a. Who did Mary see )→ <λx[see(x)(M)],PERSON >
b. Did Mary see Bo )→ <λf[f(see(B)(M))],{ID,NEG}>
The structured meanings framework analyzes the content of declaratives in an anal-
ogous fashion, contents having the form <B,F>, with B(ackground)a propositional
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6 Handbook of Logic and Language
abstract and F(ocus)an entity appropriate as an argument for B. A criterion for
question-answer congruence as manifested in English by pitch accent placement can
then be formulated straightforwardly:
(12) A proposition <B+,F>is congruent with a question <B,R>iff B=B+and
F∈R
Krifka shows that this criterion enables a wide variety of tricky cases of focal pitch
assignment to be handled. Such cases of over and under-focussing are difficult for the
more coarse grained approaches within the classical Hamblin picture. Krifka further
illustrates the need for the fine grain supplied by propositional abstracts to distinguish
the contents of certain classes of alternative and polar questions. He also argues that
certain readings of multiple wh-interrogatives involve the specification of functions—
where functions are conceived in terms familiar from constructive type theory. Build-
ing up such functions, he suggests, requires access to the question constituents and the
background of the sentence, as provided by structured meanings.
26.3 Questions in Interaction
The lion’s share of work on questions in the late twentieth century was driven by
phenomena centering around embedded interrogatives, due primarily to worries that
the unembedded variety are tainted by pragmatic complexity. Recent work, however,
driven by the need to tackle dialog, has moved to offer formal accounts of semantic and
pragmatic aspects relating to query uses. Sloganistically, one might adapt Hamblin’s
famous dictum as follows: to know the meaning of a query is to understand what
counts as a relevant response to that query. Here ‘relevant’ can be understood in a
number of senses, including ‘optimal’ and ‘coherent’.
The approaches surveyed below differ, in part, by their methodology: on the one
hand, approaches for which the starting point is a logic (or family thereof) and for
which an important constraint is to develop a framework that can accommodate phe-
nomena while deviating minimally from the starting point. An alternative perspec-
tive is more driven by empirical conversational phenomena and the need to provide a
fairly detailed linguistic analysis—developing a theory of context the metamathemat-
ical bounds of which are more open ended.
26.3.1 QUD-Oriented Approaches
One approach to explicating the effect of queries on context has been developed within
the KoS framework (Ginzburg, 1994; Ginzburg and Cooper, 2004; Larsson, 2002;
Purver, 2006; Fern´
andez, 2006; Ginzburg, 2010; Ginzburg and Fern´
andez, 2010) and,
independently, by Roberts, 1996. Common to these approaches is viewing a dynamic
and partially ordered repository of questions—Questions Under Discussion (QUD)—
as a key component of context.
Work in the KoS framework aims to provide a theory of relevance, here in the
‘coherence’ sense, that can explain the coherence and interpretability of responses
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Questions: Logic and Interactions 7
to a query, exemplified in (13). Relevance has a number of aspects that go beyond
‘semantic answerhood’, including metacommunicative (13b), metadiscursive (13c),
and genre-based (13d) aspects:
(13) Carla: Are you voting for Tory?
a. Denise: I might.
b. Denise: Who do you mean ‘Tory’?
c. Denise: I don’t know.
d. Denise: What voting system is in use?
Pretheoretically, relevance relates an utterance uto an agent’s information state I
just in case there is a way to successfully update Iwith u. Thus, defining relevance
involves interplay between semantic ontology, grammar and interaction conventions.
This requires a theory that allows such relationships to be formulated. For this purpose
Type Theory with Records is employed. This enables simultaneous reference to both
utterances and utterance types, a key desideratum for modelling metacommunicative
interaction. The formalism can, consequently, be used to build a semantic ontology,
and to write conversational interaction and grammar rules.
The main emphasis in this domain has been on explicating two main classes of
entities: (a) the dialogue gameboard (DGB), an entity associated with each convers-
ing agent, corresponding in essence to that agent’s record of the publicized aspects
of interaction. The DGB is modeled as a record type with fields tracking inter alia
turn ownership, shared assumptions, moves, and QUD; and (b) conversational rules,
the regularities that describe how conversational interaction changes dialogue game-
boards.
A general constraint (Q(uestion)-SPEC(ificity)) characterizes the contextual
background of reactive queries and assertions. The rule states that if qis the maxi-
mal element of QUD, then either participant may make a q-specific move—an utter-
ance that is a partial answer to or sub-question of q. Disagreement is accommodated
since asserting pmakes p?, the maximal element in QUD, and p?–specific utterances
include disagreements. Self-answering is directly accommodated by QSPEC given that
it licenses utterances specific to the maximal element in QUD regardless of who the
speaker of the most recent Move is. Moreover, the accounts of querying and assertion
scale up to multilogue: conversations involving more than two participants. Given A’s
query q,QSPEC and the ordering on QUD ensures that q-specific utterances can be
given by multiple participants as long as qremains under discussion. As far as asser-
tion goes, the default possibility that emerges is communal acceptance—acceptance
by one conversationalist can count as acceptance by all other addressees of an asser-
tion, a possibility whose robustness is supported by corpus evidence.
Trying to operationalize genre-based relevance presupposes that we can classify
conversations into various genres, a term we use following Bakhtin (1986) to denote
a particular type of interactional domain (e.g. interaction at a train station, at a bak-
ery, ‘casual chat’, etc.). There are at present remarkably few such taxonomies (though
see Allwood (1999) for an informal one). What one can do within KoS is to develop
classifications of conversations into genres. One way is by providing a description of
an information state of an agent who has successfully completed such a conversation.
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8 Handbook of Logic and Language
Final states of a conversation can be provided in terms of shared assumptions, moves,
and an additional field Questions No (longer) Under Discussion (QNUD)—a list of
issues characteristic of the genre which will have been resolved in interaction. This,
in turn, allows one to offer a characterization of the contextual background of initi-
ating moves, moves that occur during conversation initially and periodically during
extended interactions. Roughly, one can make an initiating move m0 if one believes
that the current conversation updated with m0 can be anticipated to conclude as final
state dgb1, which is a conversation of type G0.
Probably the main innovation of KoS is the integration of illocutionary and meta-
communicative interaction. This is explicated in terms of the dynamics of the locu-
tionary proposition pu, an Austinian proposition (Barwise and Etchemendy, 1987)
defined by the utterance and Tu, a grammatical type for classifying uthat emerges
during the process of parsing u. In the immediate aftermath of a speech event u,
the DGB gets updated with pu. In case puis true—Tucompletely classifies u—pu
becomes the LatestMove of the DGB and relevance possibilities discussed in the pre-
vious paragraph come into operation. The other contextual branch involves clarifica-
tion interaction. The coherence of clarification requests such as (13c) can be specified
by means of a uniform class of conversational rules, dubbed Clarification Context
Update Rules (CCURs) in Ginzburg (2010). Each CCUR specifies a question that
gets accommodated as the maximal element of QUD built up from a sub-utterance
u1 of the target utterance and from its corresponding utterance type (e.g. ‘What did
speaker mean by u1’). Common to all CCURs is a license to make an utterance which
is co-propositional with the maximal element of QUD. CoPropositionality for two
questions means that, modulo their domain, the questions involve similar answers.
26.3.2 Question-Integrating Logics
An alternative strategy for explicating the effect of questions on context in termsAQ:2
of operations on information states conceived in standard possible worlds terms.
Groenendijk (2006) defines the game of interrogation—a logical idealization of
the process of cooperative information exchange. Groenendijk uses a simple query-
language, the language from (Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1997)—first-order predicate
logic enriched with simplex interrogatives with the corresponding partition semantics.
As a means of combining the data emanating from declaratives and the partition rep-
resenting the issues, a context C is taken to be a symmetric and transitive relation on
the set of possible worlds W. Context change potentials can be assigned uniformly to
indicatives and interrogatives, but they have different effects on context:
(14) a. An indicative φ! is informative iff it eliminates a pair of worlds from the context as
soon as φ! is false in one of the worlds of the pair.
b. An interrogative φ? is inquisitive iff it eliminates a pair of worlds (or disconnects
two worlds) if they belong to different alternatives, i.e., if the two worlds differ in
such a way that the question would receive a different answer in them.
This set-up allows notions of consistency and entailment to be defined that apply
indiscriminately to propositions and questions, notions that enable the formulation of
Start sentence: "There
is an alternative
strategy..."
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Questions: Logic and Interactions 9
Quality and Quantity requirements for the cooperative exchange of information. The
main novelty is the notion of licensing, a notion of strict relevance: a sentence φis con-
textually licensed if whenever it causes a world to be eliminated from the data, it does
so also to all worlds related to it. This means that φonly addresses the currently live
issues. Licensing gives rise to notions of answerhood that are significantly more inclu-
sive than given by partitions. For instance, non-exhaustified quantified propositions
(e.g. ∃xPx and ∀xPx) are licensed as answers to ?xPx. Groenendijk (2006) shows how AQ:3
to apply these notions in ambiguity resolution based on the assumption that an inter-
pretation is chosen in such a way that the emergent discourse is pertinent—a notion
that encapsulates consistency, non-redundancy, and licensing. For a related approach
see Dekker (2006) who, on the basis of a synthesis of dynamic semantics, Gricean
pragmatics, and relevance theory, shows how to characterize the optimality of a
discourse.
This general strategy is taken a step further in Inquisitive Semantics (Groenendijk,
2009; Groenendijk and Roelofsen, 2009). Syntactically no distinction is made between
declaratives and interrogatives—standard propositional logic syntax is employed.
Sentences are associated with sets of alternative possibilities. Sentences are infor-
mative if they contain at least one possibility and also exclude at least one possi-
bility. Sentences are inquisitive if they contain at least two possibilities. The semantics
is set up in particular to ensure that sentences of the form ¬φare not inquisitive,
whereas sentences of the form φ∨ψtypically are. Thus, the polar question p? is
identified with the disjunction p∨¬p. In this approach a single uniform interpreta-
tion of implication is provided that deals both with conditional questions and condi-
tional assertions. Moreover, problems that beset Hamblin picture accounts concerning
the distinction between alternative and polar questions (see the earlier discussion
of structured meanings) can be resolved straightforwardly. A related approach, cast
within (an extension of) Dynamic Epistemic Logic, has been developed by van
Benthem and Minica (2009). They develop a logic which makes explicit the asking
of questions—allowing one to track the dynamics of issues as they get introduced and
are potentially resolved. Two particularly interesting features of this approach are:
(a) it enables the modeling of multi-agent scenarios; and (b) its development of tem-
poral protocols that allow one to encode constraints on allowable sequences of inter-
rogations (cf. our earlier discussion of genres).
A number of works have refined the partition theory to enable it to accommodate
the agent-relative context dependence that has been argued to affect exhaustiveness.
Aloni (2005) achieves this by defining partitions using individual concepts rather than
rigidly designating variables. van Rooy (2003a,b) links upsemantic theory with deci- AQ:4
sion theory (following the lead of Parikh (1992)) in developing an account of why
queries arise. van Rooy adopts the assumption that it is context dependent whether
a proposition completely answers a question or not. He maintains the strategy that a
question is to be identified with its set of resolving answers, but assumes that the inter-
pretation of a wh-interrogative is underspecified by its conventional meaning. Crucially,
he offers a very explicit proposal as to how the underspecification is to be resolved—
proposing that it be viewed as a decision problem in the sense of Decision Theory
(e.g. Savage, 1954). Decision problems are conceived of via the notion of the
? is
correct
links up
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10 Handbook of Logic and Language
expected utility of an action a. This allows the characterization of various key
notions:
!The utility of proposition C, UV(C): calculated as the difference between the expected
utility of the action which has maximal expected utility in case one may choose after one
learns that C is true, and correspondingly before one learns that C is true.
!The expected utility of a question: calculated as the average expected utility of the answer
that will be given.
!Information C resolves a decision problem: if after learning C, one of the actions dom-
inates all other actions, i.e. if in each resulting world no action has a higher utility than
this one.
Using decision theoretic notions allows one also to formulate a solution to prob-
lems such as the required exhaustiveness of an answer and determining the domain of
quantification of a question. This is done by maximizing the relevance of a question—
the expected utility value of the resulting question, i.e., partition, should be as high as
possible. This has the result that all individuals that could be relevant for the agent’s
decision should be in the domain.
26.3.3 Questions in SDRT
In a series of works Asher and Lascarides (1998, 2003) scale up Segmented Dis-
course Representation Theory (SDRT), a theory originally intended to explicate the
coherence of text to provide a theory of coherence of questions in dialogue. Agents
construct a discourse structure (an SDRS) incrementally, as a conversation unfolds.
Asher and Lascarides argue that two logics are involved in NL inference: a decidable
glue logic for constructing SDRSs and a rich logic of information content. Rhetorical
relations link pairs of speech acts—each relation corresponds to a speech act type
with the second relatum the appropriate background context. For instance, variousAQ:5
answer-classifying relations relate a proposition with a prior query. This extends
speech act theory intersententially (see discussion in Groenendijk and Stokhof,
1997, pp. 1064–1073). Rhetorical relations are posited only if they have concrete
context change potential effects, for instance imposing constraints on antecedents on
anaphora. The current utterance is coherent for a given agent if the agent can compute
a rhetorical relation that connects it to her SDRS and also a rhetorical relation
intended by the speaker. In this framework a detailed theory of query/response
coherence, able to deduce various implicatures, is developed, by formulating axioms
that explicate various rhetorical relations. These range from an essentially semantic
QuestionAnswerPair (QAP) that relates a true direct answer to a query, through
IndirectQuestionAnswerPair (IQAP) that relates a proposition that entails a true
direct answer relative to an agent’s SDRS, to (Not Enough Information) NEI,
which characterizes pragmatically unsatisfactory responses. By making reference to
agents’ plans, a precise and detailed characterization of query responses exemplified
by (15a) can be provided. This is based on the axiom on the rhetorical relation
Q(uery)-Elab(oration) informally summarized in (15b):
each
relation
correspond
s to a
speech act
type, with
the second
relatum
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Questions: Logic and Interactions 11
(15) a. A: When shall we meet? B: Are you free on the 18th?
b. If Q-Elab(α,β)holds between an utterance αuttered by A, where gis a goal asso-
ciated by convention with utterances of the type α, and the question βuttered by B,
then any answer to βmust elaborate a plan to achieve g
26.4 Other Question-Related Work
There has been much additional work on question-related issues over the last decade.
This includes:
!Work on the knowing that v. knowing how distinction: the paper (Stanley and Williamson,
2001) stimulated many reactions collected in Bengson and Moffett (2010).
!Negative Polarity Items in questions: van Rooy, 2003a, b; Guerzoni and Sharvit, 2007. AQ:4
!Echo/Reprise questions: Noh, 1998; Ginzburg and Sag, 2000.
!‘how’-questions: Asher and Lascarides, 1998; Jaworski, 2009.
!Predicates that select for interrogatives: Ginzburg and Sag, 2000; Lahiri, 2002; Beck and
Sharvit, 2002—the latter two references address the quantificational variability effect.
!polar questions: Romero and Han, 2004; Asher and Reese, 2005.
26.5 Conclusions
As this chapter has indicated, there is still vigorous discussion concerning the issue
of what questions are and how best to characterize them. Nonetheless, there seems
to be an emerging consensus about the need for adopting a dialogical perspective
within which such characterization should take place. This entails the need to provide
a detailed account of the response space of a query, though the empirical range of
this is still far from generally agreed. Queries provided as responses are an area on
which there is much emerging and distinctive research, from all types of frameworks
surveyed here.
Another area where there has been renewed engagement and progress concerns
Boolean operations on questions and propositions, including mixed cases. Detailed
empirical work is still needed in combination with formal accounts, as the new possi-
bilities that have emerged also lead to overgeneration unless suitably constrained.
As is common in semantics, the tension between achieving empirical v. cognitive
v. logical adequacy is continually apparent. The extent to which all three can be com-
bined remains an open question one hopes will be resolved positively.
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Author Queries:
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AQ:4 Please make 2003a and 2003b amend on p. 9.
AQ:5 Kindly check the changes here “relatum” to “relating”.
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