Published 07/10/2012
How to Cite
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Abstract
In the paper it is assumed that the propositional content of a question and the range of the relevant answers to it are understood with the help of pragmatic factors. Following Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Roman Ingarden, two fundamental components of the question content are distinguished, i.e. the datum quaestionis and the obiectum quaestionis – the latter consisting in a variable ranging over a research domain. An analysis of concrete questions (both yes-no questions and wh-questions) from a corpus of written texts is made and a Gricean inference model is applied to show that the research domain is determined according to the context and the range of relevant answers is established at the token level.