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Questions
A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be considered bona fide questions, as they are not expected to be answered. Questions come in a number of varieties. ''Polar questions'' are those such as the English example "Is this a polar question?", which can be answered with "yes" or "no". ''Alternative questions'' such as "Is this a polar question, or an alternative question?" present a list of possibilities to choose from. '' Open questions'' such as "What kind of question is this?" allow many possible resolutions. Questions are widely studied in linguistics and philosophy of language. In the subfield of pragmatics, questions are regarded as illocutionary acts which raise an issue to be resolved in discourse. In approaches to formal semantics such as altern ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Utterance
In spoken language analysis, an utterance is a continuous piece of speech, often beginning and ending with a clear pause. In the case of oral languages, it is generally, but not always, bounded by silence. Utterances do not exist in written language; only their representations do. They can be represented and delineated in written language in many ways. In oral/spoken language, utterances have several characteristics such as paralinguistic features, which are aspects of speech such as facial expression, gesture, and posture. Prosodic features include stress, intonation, and tone of voice, as well as ellipsis, which are words that the listener inserts in spoken language to fill gaps. Moreover, other aspects of utterances found in spoken languages are non-fluency features including: voiced/un-voiced pauses (i.e. "umm"), tag questions, and false starts, or when someone begins uttering again to correct themselves. Other features include fillers (i.e. "and stuff"), accent/dialect, deict ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Set (mathematics)
A set is the mathematical model for a collection of different things; a set contains '' elements'' or ''members'', which can be mathematical objects of any kind: numbers, symbols, points in space, lines, other geometrical shapes, variables, or even other sets. The set with no element is the empty set; a set with a single element is a singleton. A set may have a finite number of elements or be an infinite set. Two sets are equal if they have precisely the same elements. Sets are ubiquitous in modern mathematics. Indeed, set theory, more specifically Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, has been the standard way to provide rigorous foundations for all branches of mathematics since the first half of the 20th century. History The concept of a set emerged in mathematics at the end of the 19th century. The German word for set, ''Menge'', was coined by Bernard Bolzano in his work ''Paradoxes of the Infinite''. Georg Cantor, one of the founders of set theory, gave the following defin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Loaded Question
A loaded question is a form of complex question that contains a controversial assumption (e.g., a presumption of guilt). Such questions may be used as a rhetorical tool: the question attempts to limit direct replies to be those that serve the questioner's agenda. The traditional example is the question "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Whether the respondent answers yes or no, they will admit to having a wife and having beaten her at some time in the past. Thus, these facts are ''presupposed'' by the question, and in this case an entrapment, because it narrows the respondent to a single answer, and the fallacy of many questions has been committed. The fallacy relies upon context for its effect: the fact that a question presupposes something does not in itself make the question fallacious. Only when some of these presuppositions are not necessarily agreed to by the person who is asked the question does the argument containing them become fallacious. Hence, the same question ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rhetorical Question
A rhetorical question is one for which the questioner does not expect a direct answer: in many cases it may be intended to start a discourse, or as a means of displaying or emphasize the speaker's or author's opinion on a topic. A common example is the question "Can't you do anything right?" This question, when posed, is intended not to ask about the listener's ability but rather to insinuate the listener's lack of ability. Forms Negative assertions A rhetorical question may be intended as a challenge. The question is often difficult or impossible to answer. In the example, ''What have the Romans ever done for us?'' (''Monty Python's Life of Brian'') the question functions as a negative assertion. It is intended to mean ''The Romans have never done anything for us!''. When Shakespeare's Mark Antony exclaims: ''Here was a Caesar! when comes such another?'' it functions as an assertion that Caesar possesses such rare qualities they may never be seen again. (''Julius Caesar'', Act 3, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Imperative Sentence
The imperative mood is a grammatical mood that forms a command or request. The imperative mood is used to demand or require that an action be performed. It is usually found only in the present tense, second person. To form the imperative mood, use the base form of the verb. They are sometimes called ''directives'', as they include a feature that encodes directive force, and another feature that encodes modality of unrealized interpretation. An example of a verb used in the imperative mood is the English phrase "Go." Such imperatives imply a second-person subject (''you''), but some other languages also have first- and third-person imperatives, with the meaning of "let's (do something)" or "let them (do something)" (the forms may alternatively be called cohortative and jussive). Imperative mood can be denoted by the glossing abbreviation . It is one of the irrealis moods. Formation Imperative mood is often expressed using special conjugated verb forms. Like other finite ve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Display Question
A display question (also called ''known-information question'') is a type of question requiring the other party to demonstrate their knowledge on a subject matter when the questioner already knows the answer. They are contrasted with referential questions (or ''information-seeking questions''), a type of question posed when the answer is not known by the questioner at the time of inquiry. Both question types are used widely in language education in order to elicit language practice but the use of referential questions is generally preferred to the use of display questions in communicative language teaching. Display questions bear similarities to closed questions in terms of their requirement for short and limited answers and they can be classified under convergent questions. On the other hand, referential questions and open questions are similar in their requirement for long, often varied, answers, and can be grouped under divergent questions. Both display and referential question ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII of England, King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press A university press is an academic publishing house specializing in monographs and scholarly journals. Most are nonprofit organizations and an integral component of a large research university. They publish work that has been reviewed by schola ... in the world. It is also the King's Printer. Cambridge University Press is a department of the University of Cambridge and is both an academic and educational publisher. It became part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, following a merger with Cambridge Assessment in 2021. With a global sales presence, publishing hubs, and offices in more than 40 Country, countries, it publishes over 50,000 titles by authors from over 100 countries. Its publishing includes more than 380 academic journals, monographs, reference works, school and uni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indirect Speech Acts
In the philosophy of language and linguistics, speech act is something expressed by an individual that not only presents information but performs an action as well. For example, the phrase "I would like the kimchi; could you please pass it to me?" is considered a speech act as it expresses the speaker's desire to acquire the kimchi, as well as presenting a request that someone pass the kimchi to them. According to Kent Bach, "almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience". The contemporary use of the term goes back to J. L. Austin's development of performative utterances and his theory of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Speech acts serve their function once they are said or communicated. These are commonly taken to include acts s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Subject–auxiliary Inversion
Subject–auxiliary inversion (SAI; also called subject–operator inversion) is a frequently occurring type of inversion in English, whereby a finite auxiliary verb – taken here to include finite forms of the copula ''be'' – appears to "invert" (change places) with the subject. The word order is therefore Aux-S (auxiliary–subject), which is the opposite of the canonical SV ( subject–verb) order of declarative clauses in English. The most frequent use of subject–auxiliary inversion in English is in the formation of questions, although it also has other uses, including the formation of condition clauses, and in the syntax of sentences beginning with negative expressions (negative inversion). In certain types of English sentences, inversion is also possible with verbs other than auxiliaries; these are described in the article on subject-verb inversion. Overview Subject–auxiliary inversion involves placing the subject after a finite auxiliary verb, rather than before i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals. Etymology The word ''syntax'' comes from Ancient Greek roots: "coordination", which consists of ''syn'', "together", and ''táxis'', "ordering". Topics The field of syntax contains a number of various topics that a syntactic theory is often designed to handle. The relation between the topics is treated differently in different theories, and some of them may not be considered to be distinct but instead to be derived from one another (i.e. word order can be seen as the result of movement rules derived from grammatical relations). Se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Illocutionary
The concept of illocutionary acts was introduced into linguistics by the philosopher J. L. Austin in his investigation of the various aspects of speech acts. In his framework, ''locution'' is what was said and meant, ''illocution'' is what was done, and ''perlocution'' is what happened as a result. When somebody says "Is there any salt?" at the dinner table, the ''illocutionary act'' is a request: "please give me some salt" even though the ''locutionary act'' (the literal sentence) was to ask a question about the presence of salt. The ''perlocutionary act'' (the actual effect), might be to cause somebody to pass the salt. Overview The notion of an illocutionary act is closely connected with Austin's doctrine of the so-called 'performative' and 'constative utterances': an utterance is "performative" ''if, and only if'' it is issued in the course of the "doing of an action" (1975, 5), by which, again, Austin means the performance of an illocutionary act (Austin 1975, 6 n2, 133). Acco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
