The Meaning of Questions

Polar interrogative sentences ('yes/no questions') are different from the corresponding declarative sentences not only pragmatically-in terms of the illocutionary forces that utterances of them can have-but also semantically, i.e. in terms of the LINGUISTIC analysis of their meaning. Keeping a clear distinction between syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analyses, we can isolate a very small number of syntactic categories and an equally small (but not isomorphic) number of semantic categories, but a virtually unlimited number of illocutionary forces, which result from the interaction of these categories with the total situation. The analysis of ordinary polar interrogatives also applies, without change, to tag questions.