Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS
A Logic of Interrogation Should Be Internalized in a Modal Logic for Knowledge
by Rani Nelken and Chung-chieh Shan
Source: Sematics Archive
We propose a new, modal interpretation of questions. The idea of interpreting questions via modal logic goes back to Hintikka (1976) and ?qvist (1965), who interpret a question as a request for knowledge: ?bring it about that I know whether . . . ?. Such a request is composed of an imperative part and an epistemic part. Focusing on the latter, we interpret a question as the knowledge condition required in order to answer it completely. We will reduce the epistemic part of the meaning of both yes-no questions and wh-questions to statements of the form ?it is known whether? or ?it is in the common ground that . . . ?. For instance, for a yes-no question such as Is Alice quitting?, the meaning is ?it is known that Alice is quitting or it is known that Alice is not quitting?. Several di erent approaches have been suggested in linguistic semantics for modeling questions.1. It is popular to follow Hamblin (1973) and Karttunen (1977) (hereafter HK)
in taking a question to denote its set of partial answers, or partial true answers. For instance, for the wh-question Who?s quitting?, these would be answers of the form: Alice is quitting, or Alice and Bob are quitting.
2. Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984, 1996; hereafter GS) propose a more parsimonious approach in which the answers in the set are required to be complete and mutually exclusive?in other words, a partition of possible worlds in the space of logical possibilities. For the same question, these answers would be Nobody is quitting, Just Alice is quitting, etc.
3. In contrast to these firmly intensional question denotations, Nelken and Francez (2000, 2002; hereafter NF) propose an extensional interpretation. The meaning of the same question is r (?resolved?) if it is known for every person in the domain whether he or she is quitting. Otherwise, it is ur (?unresolved?).
In this paper, we bridge these theories and combine their advantages. We begin by presenting the basic approach in Section 2. In Section 3 we delve deeper into the denotation of questions. In particular, we address what has been the main criticism against similar approaches: how to deal with embedded questions. Our theory captures GS?s prized entailment relations among questions and assertions (Section 4), while also enjoying an extensional semantics like NF?s (Section 5) and NF?s increased expressive power for complex questions (Section 6).
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Posted by Tony Marmo
at 01:01 BST
Updated: Friday, 1 October 2004 04:42 BST
