semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy Philosophy (f ...

pragmatics In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the int ...

, and

philosophy of language In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, ...

, a question under discussion (QUD) is a

question A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammar, grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are inte ...

which the interlocutors in a

discourse Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. ...

are attempting to answer. In many formal and

computational Computation is any type of arithmetic or non-arithmetic calculation that follows a well-defined model (e.g., an algorithm). Mechanical or electronic devices (or, historically, people) that perform computations are known as ''computers''. An espe ...

theories of discourse, the QUD (or an ordered set of QUD's) is among the elements of a

tuple In mathematics, a tuple is a finite ordered list (sequence) of elements. An -tuple is a sequence (or ordered list) of elements, where is a non-negative integer. There is only one 0-tuple, referred to as ''the empty tuple''. An -tuple is defi ...

called the

conversational scoreboard In linguistics and philosophy of language, the conversational scoreboard is a tuple which represents the discourse context at a given point in a conversation. The scoreboard is updated by each speech act performed by one of the interlocutors. Mo ...

which represents the current state of the conversation. Craige Roberts introduced the concept of a QUD in 1996 in order to formalize conversational relevance and explain its consequences for

information structure In linguistics, information structure, also called information packaging, describes the way in which information is formally packaged within a sentence.Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. ''Information structure and sentence form.'' Cambridge: Cambridge Univer ...

and focus marking. It has subsequently become a staple of work in semantics and pragmatics, playing a role in analyses of disparate phenomena including

donkey anaphora Donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning (it is Bound variable pronoun, bound semantics, semantically) but whose syntax, syntactical role in the sentence poses challenges to Linguist, grammarians. Such sentences def ...

and presupposition projection.

Notes

Semantics Pragmatics {{semantics-stub

See also

Notes