ABSTRACT
Question Speech acts are rule governed. There are rules that we have to follow when we intend to perform a speech act of a particular type in a certain natural language. If we intend to pose a question to a person in order to elicit an answer, we are required by the rules that govern the speech act type of posing a question to be able to recognize an answer as such and to distinguish between an answer to our question and a reaction to it that is not an answer, such as ‘I don’t know’ or a few seconds of silence. This is a general requirement, independent of any particular natural language. If we intend to pose a question in a certain natural language, then we are required by the rules that govern the speech act type of posing a question in that language to use certain features of the language, such as the interrogative grammatical form of the language, if it has one, or its interrogative intonation, if it has one. Wittgenstein, a most influential twentieth-
century philosopher, used the term ‘language game’ to mark practices, such as asking. A language game can be described as being governed by some rules. A specification of a language game is a full and accurate presentation of the rules that govern the practice. A specification of a speech act type is such a presentation of the rules that govern each performance of a speech act of that type. It has been commonly assumed that question
is a single speech act type. Instances of posing a question have usually been taken to constitute attempts on the part of the speaker to get information of a certain kind from the addressee of
the speech act. Typical instances of a sincere usage of the sentence ‘what is your address?’, under typical circumstances of addressing the speech act to a certain addressee, are intended as attempts to know the addressee’s address on grounds of the addressee’s specification of it. Such typical instances of sincerely using an
English sentence in the interrogative, in a speech act addressed to a certain addressee, manifest two of the rules that govern speech acts of asking: (a) a speech act is performed by the speaker, as intended to be addressed to a certain addressee, and (b) the speech act counts as an attempt on the part of the speaker to get information from the addressee. Assuming that speakers are rational agents, two additional rules become manifest: a precondition of sincerely posing a question is that (c) the speaker does not know the answer and is interested in knowing it, and (d) the speaker has a reason to assume the addressee of one’s speech act knows the answer. All of these rules seem to be followed when a typical speech act of posing a question is under consideration. However, a consideration of additional
instances of sincerely using interrogative sentences shows that there are some circumstances in which one or more of these rules do not have to be followed. We sincerely ask ourselves all kinds of questions when we are not our own addressees. We pose questions we know the answers to in order to examine the knowledge of some addressee. We pose questions we and our addressees know the answer to in order to create a rhetorical effect. Sometimes we pose a question we are sure our addressee cannot answer in order to teach the addressee some
lesson. Thus, posing a question is a family of different speech act types, each of which is governed by a separate system of rules, both generally and in every natural language. Questions have been extensively studied as
speech acts that play a role under special circumstances of interaction, such as interviews, interrogations and academic discussions (Crawford Camiciottoli 2008; Emmertsen 2007; Gnisci and Pontecorvo 2004). However, such studies shed light on the nature of these interactions more than on question as a speech act type. A study of brain localization of speech act types has revealed an intricate relationship between questions and requests (Soroker et al. 2005).
