Questions

The view that questions are ''requests for missing information'' is too simple when language use is considered. Formally utterances are questions when they are syntactically marked as such or by prosodic marking. Functionally questions request that certain information is made available in the next conversational turn. But functional and formal questionhood are independent: what is formally a question can be functionally something else for instance a statement a complaint or a request. Conversely what is functionally a question is often expressed as a statement. Also verbal signals such as eye-gaze head-nods or even practical actions can serve information-seeking functions that are very similar to the function of linguistic questions. With original cross-cultural and multidisciplinary contributions from linguists anthropologists psychologists and conversation analysts this book asks what questions do and how a question can shape the answer it evokes.