Questions, Queries, and Facts

This work concerns itself with characterising the different types of contents that arise from uses of interrogative sentences, describing what meanings get associated with particular interrogative sentences and explaining how these get put together compositionally on the basis of the meaning of their constituents, with particular attention to the meaning of interrogative phrases. A view of questions is offered wherein these constitute the subclass of singular propositional entities, unresolved states-of-affairs (SOA's), that contain one or more intrinsic informational voids, characterised technically as argument roles of the propositional entity with whom no entity is associated. This view provides for an inherently richer notion of answerhood that is at the same time based on entities that are more plausibly available to cognitive agents engaged in querying.