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Has he lost his mind? Why have I brought you all here? Let me explain. The term rhetorical question may be colloquially applied to a number of uses of questions where the speaker does not seek or expect an answer (perhaps because the answer is implied or obvious), such as: Which has the form of an interrogative, but the illocutionary force of a directive. For example, the imperative sentence "Pass the salt." can be reformulated (somewhat more politely) as: Questions may also be used as the basis for a number of indirect speech acts. For example:Ī: When should I open your gift? B: Open it now. It differs from a typical ("information") question in that the characteristic response is a directive rather than a declarative statement.

For example, a teacher or game show host might ask "What is the capital of Australia?" to test the knowledge of a student or contestant.Ī direction question is one that seeks an instruction rather than factual information. Ī slight variant is the display question, where the addressee is asked to produce information which is already known to the speaker. The principal use of questions is to elicit information from the person being addressed by indicating the information which the speaker (or writer) desires. Such mismatches of form and function are called indirect speech acts. For example "I would like to know your name." satisfies the pragmatic definition, but not the semantic or syntactic ones. While prototypical questions (such as "What is your name?") will satisfy all three definitions, their overlap is not complete. Īt 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. Īt the level of pragmatics, a question is an illocutionary category of speech act which seeks to obtain information from the addressee. Linguistically, a question may be defined on three levels.Īt the level of semantics, a question is defined by its ability to establish a set of logically possible answers.