Question and Question Mark Saul Epstein Fri, 16 Jan 1998 12:57:49 -0600 From: Rob Zook Date: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 3:10 PM >At 01:18 PM 1/13/98 -0600, Saul Epstein wrote: > >>>>And hence my clarification that I meant acts a question mark, >>>>not as a question. >>> >>>Well, I guess I did not find that very clear-ifying ;-) >> >>Then, or now? I could spend more time on that, which would certainly be >>more constructive. > >Yes, please, let us return to linguistics, all this philosophy makes >my head ache. All right. Consider the following A: Louis is king in France B: is Louis king in France C: He is the king of France D: who is the king of France In each of these two pairs, the first sentence is in the indicative mood (making it a statement) while the second is in the interrogative mood (making it a question). The sentences aren't punctuated, though, and the written form conveys no tone of voice. So what marks the difference between the indicative and the interrogative? In the first pair, the difference is purely one of word order. The normal word order in English is subject-verb-object, which A obeys. In B, the order is verb-subject-object. This is the word order for a "true or false" question, somewhat complicated by English's reliance on participles -- especially in the present tense (e,g. "Are we having fun yet?"). In the second pair, the difference is the substitution of a personal pronoun "he," referring to a known person, with the interrogative pronoun "who," referring specifically to the unknown person whose identification will answer the question. Words like "who" act like blank lines in a "fill in the blank" question, and they are all derived from a single base form, modified to fit the part of speech about which the question is being asked. English also modifies word order for such questions, putting the unknown term in the initial position, followed by the verb, the subject, and the object (e,g. "Where does the king live?"). So there are two kinds of questions here. The first form could be stated evaluate x where x is an expression whose truth or falsehood the speaker would like to know. The second could be stated return x, if x_y where x is an unknown expression, _ is a known relationship, and y is a known expression. Both kinds of questions are labelled in English (and other languages) with the question mark, . The mark doesn't say anything about the kind of question being asked, only that one is being asked. And though we have no examples of the second, "fill in the blank," type of question, and no indication of how to construct interrogative pronouns or articles, I have been assuming that the interrogative particle acts in a fashion analogous to the question mark, and to interrogative particles in those Terran languages that possess one (I can't think of them at the moment). This does not need to be the case, of course. -- from Saul Epstein liberty*uit,net http://www,johnco,cc,ks,us/~sepstein "Surak ow'phaaper thes'hi thes'tca'; thes'phaadjar thes'hi suraketca'." -- K'dvarin Urswhl'at