Asking (non-)canonical questions

Abstract

Questions are classically taken to be requests for information, while acknowledging a wide variety of ‘non-canonical’ questions that do not have this function (e.g. rhetorical questions, exam questions, etc). A standard current approach is to take the request-for-information view as an analytical starting point and then weaken it for the counterexamples. This paper proposes an alternative view of questioning that encompasses many of these counterexamples directly: to ask a question is to open coordination on the public resolution of an issue. This coordination-centric view, I argue, accounts for much of the landscape of both canonical and non-canonical questions, while generalizing much previous work related to Questions Under Discussion in discourse.