Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 83. kötet (1981)

Tanulmányok - Kiefer Ferenc: A kérdő mondatról [Questions] 273

292 KIEFER FÉREM) Questions by FERENC KIEFER The paper deals with somé semantic and pragmatic aspects of questions. First, the author tackles the problem of what should be considered to be the semantic meaning of questions. He distinguishes four types of questions: yes-no questions, alternative questions, whquestions and open questions (why-qviestions, for example, belong to open questions). The answer-set ( = the set of possible answors) serves not only as a basis for the classification of questions but plays also an important rôle in the semantic représentation of questions. Second, the pragmatic functions of questions are described in a framework which makes use of certain cognitive attitudes of the speaker. There are four types of speech situations which are relevant in the présent oontext. Each speech situation is characterized by what the speaker knows (i.e. if he knows the answer or not and what he assumes about the hearer, i.e. if he assumes that the hearer knows the answer or not). Third, an examination of the mátrix predicates of embedded questions allows for interesting generalizations about question-answer attitudes (propositional attitudes which take the propositional content of questions as embedded sentences), about their relation to each other and to the cognitive attitudes mentioned in connection with the pragmatic interprétation of questions. It turns out, among another things, that there is a one-toone correspondence between question attitudes and answer attitudes and that answer attitudes are ail factive. The factivity of answer attitudes explains why a sentence such as John knows who was here no longer contains an open structure. •