© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004378308_003 chapter 2 Questions in Discourse: an Overview * Edgar Onea and Malte Zimmermann 1 Introduction In the past decades of research, questions have become a very prominent topic at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Certainly, they are a natural and challenging topic for any semantic theory rooted in the tradition of truth- conditional semantics (Davidson, 1967). Since questions do not seem to come with plain truth conditions, a semantic theory of the meaning of questions always needs to go one step beyond the standard derivation of truth condi- tions and thereby reveal aspects of meaning hidden to pure truth-conditional semantics. However, the role questions play in most recent research devel- opments goes way beyond this. Questions have been claimed to be a crucial ingredient of discourse representation, which makes them one of the most important, or even the most important interface between grammar and prag- matics. The notion of questions appears to be indispensable for spelling out the discourse-semantic meaning of grammatical structures in natural language in certain theories following Roberts (1996). This holds even for assertions, which usually are not assigned a question component in their underlying meaning. Moreover, some semantic theories, such as Inquisitive Semantics (Ciardelli, 2009; Groenendijk & Roelofsen, 2009; Ciardelli et al., 2013), even take ques- tion meanings as the most basic type of meaning. On these accounts, asser- tions suddenly end up being treated on a par with questions and not the other way around. Given the enormous importance of questions in the recent semantic and pragmatic literature, this chapter will give a brief overview of the main semantic theories of what questions are and of how questions should be semantically represented. Particular attention is paid to the presentation and evaluation of some recent developments in theory-building, focusing on * We gratefully acknowledge that this overview chapter would not be conceivable without extensive discussions with members and collaborators of the network Questions in Dis- course funded by the German Science Foundation, especially David Beaver, Daniel Büring, Jeroen Groenendijk and Floris Roelofsen. We also gratefully acknowledge that this research was partly funded by the project “Exhaustiveness in embedded questions across languages” funded by the German Science Foundation as part of the Priority Program “Xprag.de” (http:// www.xprag.de). All errors are, of course, our own. Edgar Onea and Malte Zimmermann - 9789004378308 Downloaded from Brill.com05/28/2020 04:31:31PM via free access