How do people form questions?

February 11, 2008 11:53 AM

How do people form questions? What fields of study cover the concepts of question formation? Why do people question differently, within the same cultural milieu?

I have suddenly become curious about why/how people form questions (both internally, and how they vocalize/write those questions for others). For example, some people seem to "ask" questions by merely stating assumptions. Others use querying tones for things they regard as unquestionable.

These behaviors puzzle me to no end, and I want to learn more about such things. Links, anecdotes & attempts at reasoning are all welcome.

posted by aramaic to religion & philosophy (11 comments total)

Further example: a man calls me (on a particular phone number which is for the stated purpose of asking a question of my organization), and proceeds to describe a set of assumptions. At no point does he actually ask a question in a traditional sense (either by tone or by sentence structure). Once he's finished, he stops speaking (clearly waiting for me to do something).

Puzzled, I then ask him "My apologies, but what exactly is your question?"

...and he gets pissed off for some reason, becomes mostly inarticulate, and fumbles his way toward deciding to just hang up. Meanwhile I'm still sitting there waiting for him to ask a question. He & I are both native English speakers and, judging from names & accents, come from similar cultural/national backgrounds.

This, and related situations, confuse me. Since part of my job is to be a professional answerer-of-obscure-questions, I want to understand this sort of thing.
posted by aramaic at 12:01 PM on February 11, 2008

I think that man's implied question was, "Am I making the correct assumptions?"
posted by qvtqht at 12:46 PM on February 11, 2008

There's a huge amount of work on this in linguistics/philosophy, at least with respect to how questions are formed, and what different kinds of intonation & ways of forming questions do. Actually, from that perspective I'm afraid your question is so broad that I'm not sure where to begin, and it is something I work on. There are some moderately readable surveys, such as this one (though probably not more than moderately readable to a non-specialist). I can try to read some specific questions into some things you wrote:

For example, some people seem to "ask" questions by merely stating assumptions.

One goal of many people working on this and related topics in linguistics is to provide a formal/mathematical model of discourse. A common thread to many of these models is that there is always a set of things that are "questions under discussion" for any discourse. They do not need to be connected to an explicit question asked in the discourse, though they can be, and the representations of the two are typically similar. So it is possible to use an assertion/declarative sentence to both implicitly raise a question, and to explicitly provide a potential answer to it. In the right context, this potential answer might end up as just a suggested assumption, but the question will still end up as a question under discussion. If you start paying attention to this kind of thing, you will see that implicit raising of questions is extremely common. (Warning: it is hard to listen to what someone is saying and think about how it works at the same time.)

(On preview: I am not sure exactly what is going on in your phone example without more details,
but I suspect that the person on the phone was doing what I describe in an effective way...what I am talking about here is something that native speakers will do automatically in cases where communication is succeeding. If there are differing background assumptions this kind of thing can fail, and some speakers are more adept than others at recognizing what is called a "defective" common ground.)

Others use querying tones for things they regard as unquestionable.

Perhaps what you mean is a thing called a "rising declarative". Direct polar questions are characterized by a rising intonation, combined with an auxiliary verb appearing out front of the sentence. ("Should John go to the store?" with a final pitch rise vs. "John should go to the store." with a final falling/flat pitch.) You can put this rising intonation on a declarative sentence ("John should go to the store?") to get a sentence with a meaning halfway between the two. A well-known analysis of this construction says that a rising declarative does two things: it commits the addressee to its content (if the addressee goes along with it), and it signals that the speaker is not committed to the content. This contrasts with a regular polar question which commits neither to the content, and with a declarative which commits the speaker to it. So the speaker expresses that there is some "bias" towards a positive resolution of the question, despite their lack of personal knowledge of the answer.
posted by advil at 12:48 PM on February 11, 2008 [3 favorites]

er, I suspect that the person on the phone was not doing what I describe in an effective way
posted by advil at 12:52 PM on February 11, 2008

One of the domains that concerns itself with this topic is information science. A good starting point might be to google the phrase "anomalous state of knowledge.

Also, if you're not a professionally trained answerer-of-obscure questions, you might want to learn about the art of the reference interview. Hope that helps, and my apologies if this info is old hat to you!
posted by kimota at 1:03 PM on February 11, 2008

The Groenendijk/Stokhof chapter was quite useful, so thank you for that!

...the point of my question is largely an attempt by me to get a better grip on what is happening when people ask questions, and how to respond effectively. As you can see, I'm having some difficulty articulating this myself!

In my example, a person is calling a phone number which exists solely for the purpose of answering arcane questions. There is no other reason to call this number, and yet many people seem to be doing something akin to calling, and then saying "The sky is blue, and gravity works."

That does not strike me as a question. If I treat it as a question, I garner negative responses. If I do not treat it as a question, I garner negative responses. If I ignore it completely and wait for further communication, I garner negative responses.

Consequently, I am trying to determine what may be going on when people frame questions, so that I can better respond to them (and, potentially, frame my own questions to them).
posted by aramaic at 1:12 PM on February 11, 2008

If I treat it as a question, I garner negative responses. If I do not treat it as a question, I garner negative responses. If I ignore it completely and wait for further communication, I garner negative responses.

I know you're not really asking for specific advice about how to deal with the example caller, but I wonder if the solution is to find a better way to say "My apologies, but what exactly is your question?" such that it sounds like you're already engaging with what they're saying, that indicates that they've done nothing wrong, that what they're saying mostly makes sense, but that you're trying to get to the crux of what they want from you. "What exactly is your question?" might be coming off as harsh the way "What do you want from me?" or "What do you want me to do about it?" would. In all three cases, what you're saying is straightforward but the cultural build-up behind the stock phrases is going to put some callers on edge.

Alternatively -- and this might be what you're suspecting -- some of these callers might be calling to ask questions merely out of loneliness or, alternatively again, out of a vague desire to prove themselves knowledgeable. (Teaching adults a new trade a few years back, I'd find every class would have at least one this type of student; they'd ask questions but not really care about the answer and get flummoxed if it turned out their question rested on wrong assumptions. Since they were paying a fairly high amount of money to take a short class, my general response was to humor their questions anyway as long as it wasn't disrupting the flow of the class too much).
posted by nobody at 1:39 PM on February 11, 2008

Some people make statements to see if anyone disagrees with them. In your example I would try something like, "yes most of what you say is correct, but x is not true. It is more like this ..."

On the other hand any organization, esp a religious one (just a guess), will collect it's share of haters, so you are bound to get some people who just want to call up and educate you on the error of your ways. I would try to politely and calmly outline your org's position. You will not get anywhere but at least they will find you polite.
posted by d4nj450n at 2:35 PM on February 11, 2008

Are there any AskMe questions which don't end in a question mark? I would guess not so many. Over the phone, people more likely to make tentative statements, hinting they'd really like an answer, without coming out and asking directly. Example. On the phone, someone would say, "So, there's this thing called RSS feed." When they really mean, "What the hell is RSS feed?"
posted by proj08 at 5:58 PM on February 11, 2008

Yep, there's a pretty big literature on this, but I know it only peripherally. In linguistics, Groenendijk and Stokhof are the go-to guys for the logic of questions, but I see they've already been mentioned. In philosophy, you'll want to look at Sylvain Bromberger. He's got some papers and books online here. I don't know if they'll help you answer questions on the phone, but think you'll find them interesting.
posted by painquale at 7:48 PM on February 11, 2008

Not on questions specifically, but looking at the logic of how we speak, and the rules that go unstated, you might be interested to look at Grice's maxims. It sounds like you feel as if your example guy is violating (something like) a maxim about what questions should be. Whenever I get that feeling ("no, you're doing it wrong") I think of Grice and find it calming.
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:48 PM on February 11, 2008 [2 favorites]