Asking Questions: Using meaningful structures to imply ignorance - Rilegato

Fiengo, Robert

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0199208417 ISBN 13: 9780199208418

Casa editrice: OUP Oxford, 2007

Riassunto

Asking Questions examines a central phenomenon of language - the use of sentences to ask questions. Although there is a sizable literature on the syntax and semantics of interrogatives, the logic of "questions", and the speech act of questioning, no one has tried to put the syntax and semantics together with the speech acts over the full range of phenomena we pretheoretically think of as asking questions. Robert Fiengo not only does this, but also takes up some more foundational issues in the theory of language.

By positioning the findings of contemporary grammatical theorizing within the larger domain of language use, Fiengo challenges the use theorist to acknowledge the importance of grammatical form and the grammarian to acknowledge the importance of use. In addition to developing an Austinian distinction between four questioning speech-acts, and a proposal concerning the philosophy of language, Asking Questions contains a useful discussion of the type-token distinction and how use of language compares with use of other things. Fiengo also considers the nature of multiple questions, revealing what one must know to ask them, and what speech acts one may perform when asking them.

Asking Questions advances our understanding of a wide range of issues in a number of important respects. Scholars and students of linguistics and philosophy will find plenty to interest them in this pioneering work.

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Recensione

The book...presents a wealth of information on the use of interrogative sentence types, and offers insightful observations. It will be mandatory reading for researchers seeking comprehensive data coverage on questions and an interesting new approach to the analysis of questions and general interface issues. (Yurie Hara, Journal of Linguistics)

This is a clever and well-written book (Eirian C. Davies, Functions of Language)

It will be mandatory reading for researchers seeking comprehensive data coverage on questions and an interesting new approach to the analysis of questions and general interface issues. (Yurie Hara, Linguistics)

The distinguished linguist Robert Fiengo has produced a fascinating book. Asking Questions could almost be subtitled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Questions but Never Thought to Ask. It insightfully addresses many major questions about questions and many more smaller but equally interesting ones. Fiengo sketches a big picture of the interrogative landscape, but to me the delight is as much in the details. (Kent Bach, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

Contenuti

• 1: Introduction: ignorance and incompleteness
• 2: The instrumental model of talking: how to talk about talk
• 3: Open questions, confirmation questions, and how to choose which sentence-type to use when asking them
• 4: Quantifiers, wh-expressions, and manners of interpretation
• 5: Syntactic structure
• 6: On the questioning speech-acts and the kinds of ignorance they address
• References
• Index

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: OUP Oxford
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0199208417
• ISBN 13: 9780199208418
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 194
• Contatto del produttore: Messaggerie Libri; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8.; Assago Milano; 20090; Italia