A question is any of several kinds of linguistic expressions normally used by a questioner to request the presentation of Information is a term with many meanings depending on context, but is as a rule closely related to such concepts as meaning, knowledge, instruction, communication, representation, and mental stimulus. Although many people speak of the advent of the information age, the information society, and information technologies, and even though information... information back to the questioner, in the form of an A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) -- also known as International ANSWER and sometimes written as ANSWER -- is a protest organization established by the International Action Center, which was founded by former United States attorney general Ramsey Clark. It has organized many of... answer, by the audience. Alternatively, one may say that the question is the request itself, and the interrogative In linguistics, the sentence is a unit of language, characterised in most languages by the presence of a finite verb. For example, The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The shortest legal sentences in the English language are I am and I do - although with some bending of... sentence merely expresses it, but we will not use this sense. Questions thus resemble other requesting expressions as well as Command has multiple meanings: An order. In organizations, a command is an office or position of authority. In telecommunication, the term command has the following meanings: An order for an action to take place. In data transmission, an instruction sent by the primary station instructing a secondary station to perform... commands in normally being used to elicit a A response is the following: Often a response is the result of a stimulus. Usually a response is a reply to a query. In data transmission, a response is the content of the control field of a response frame advising the primary station concerning the processing by the secondary station... response. Indeed some expressions, such as "Would you pass the butter?", have the grammatical form of questions but function as requests for action, not for answers; these will be treated under request rather than here.

Questions have a number of secondary uses: They may be used ("Socratically") to guide the questioner along an avenue of For the suburb of Melbourne, Australia, see Research, Victoria. Research is an active, diligent and systematic process of inquiry in order to discover, interpret or revise facts, events, behaviors, or theories, or to make practical applications with the help of such facts, laws or theories. The term research is also... research. A A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for rhetorical effect rather than for the purpose of getting an answer. Generally, a rhetorical question seeks to encourage reflection within the listener as to what the answer to the question (at least, the answer... rhetorical question is asked in order to make a point, and does not expect an answer (often the answer is implied or obvious). Presuppositional questions, such as "Have you stopped beating your wife?" may be used as a joke or to embarrass the audience, because any answer a person could give would imply more information than he was willing to affirm. Questions can also be titles of works of art and literature.

Grammar

In This article is about grammar from a linguistic perspective. For English grammar rules see English writing style. According to the structuralist point of view, grammar is the study of the rules governing the use of a language. That set of rules is also called the grammar of the language, and... grammar, most languages distinguish interrogative sentences that put questions from declarative sentences that state propositions by In linguistics, syntax is the study of the rules, or patterned relations, that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. Syntax originates from the Greek words συν (syn, meaning together) and ταξις (taxis, meaning sequence/order). It concerns how different words... syntax. Some devices used by languages for marking questions include:

• A different tonal pattern (often a raised tone near the end of the sentence)
• A marked Word order, in linguistic typology, refers to the order in which words appear in sentences across different languages. In many languages, changes in word order occur due to topicalization or in questions. However, all languages are generally assumed to have a basic word order. That word order is unmarked. That... word order different from the usual word order in statements (see wh-movement)
• An In linguistics and grammar, the interrogative mood is a grammatical mood used for asking questions. For most languages, there is no special question-asking mood. Many languages do one of the following to ask a question: add a particle to the beginning or end of a sentence. Examples: French adds... interrogative mood or some other verb This article is about inflection in linguistics. For a mathematical meaning, see Stationary point. Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i.e. relational) information, such as grammatical gender, tense, person, etc. Declension and conjugation Those... inflection such as the The subjunctive mood (sometimes referred to as the conjunctive mood) is a grammatical mood of the verb that expresses wishes, commands (in subordinate clauses), and statements that are contrary to fact. The subjunctive mood in English W. Somerset Maugham said that The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and... subjunctive mood
• A In linguistics, the term particle is often employed as a useful catch-all lacking a strict definition. A general requisite is that something has to be a word on its own to qualify as a particle. Depending on its context, the meaning of the term may overlap with such notions... grammatical particle (cf The Japanese language is a spoken and written language used mainly in Japan. The Japanese name for the language is Nihongo (日本語). History and classification Historical linguists agree that Japanese is a Japonic language, but do not agree further about the origin of the Japanese language; there are... Japanese ka, Mandarin Chinese (written) language (pinyin: zhōngw n) written in Chinese characters The Chinese language (汉语/漢語, 华语/華語, or 中文; Pinyin: H nyǔ, Hu yǔ, or Zhōngw n) is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although Chinese... Chinese ma)

Combinations of any of the above are possible, as well as alternative patterns for different types of questions. For example, English employs the syntactic approach (word order change) for common questions, but resorts to raising the tone and leaving the word order as it is for focused (emphatic) questions such as "You did what?". This article is about the international language known as Spanish. For other languages spoken in Spain see Languages of Spain. Spanish or Castilian is an Iberian Romance language, and the third or fourth most spoken language in the world. It is spoken as a first language by about 352 million... Spanish changes the word order only when An interrogative pronoun (also known simply as an interrogative) is a pronoun used in asking questions. The interrogative pronouns of English are: Adjectival: which, used to ask for a choice out of a known number of choices; or what, used for one out of a large or infinite number of... interrogative pronouns are involved (not in yes-no questions).

In languages written in the The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the standard script of the English language and most of the languages of western and central Europe, and of those areas settled by Europeans. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the... Latin alphabet, the A question mark is a punctuation mark and, more pedantically, a tone mark. It usually marks a full stop, replacing the period at the end of an interrogatory sentence, such as Where did you get that hat?. It can also be used mid-sentence to mark a merely interrogative phrase... question mark (or, in the case of This article is about the international language known as Spanish. For other languages spoken in Spain see Languages of Spain. Spanish or Castilian is an Iberian Romance language, and the third or fourth most spoken language in the world. It is spoken as a first language by about 352 million... Spanish, a pair of them) identifies questions orthographically.

Questions and answers

The simplest questions implicitly or explicitly request information from a certain range (finite or infinite) of alternatives. When information purporting to be that requested is presented back to the questioner, the question is said to be answered. The information thus presented is called an answer. Answers may be For the direction right, see left and right or starboard. For the political trend or ideology, see Right wing. The following article discusses the notion of rights in matters of philosophy and Law. At its most fundamental, a right is a claim, on other persons, that is acknowledged and reciprocated... right or A wrong is a concept in law and ethics. In law, a wrong can be a legal injury, which is any damage resulting from a violation of a legal right. It can also imply the state of being contrary to the principles of justice or law. It means that something... wrong. They are wrong if they present Logic (from ancient Greek λόγος (logos), meaning reason) is the study of arguments. Its primary task is to set up criteria for distinguishing good from bad arguments. Arguments express inferences—the processes whereby new assertions are produced from already established ones. As such, of particular... false information. If they present information from outside the proferred alternatives, they may be called wrong or simply inappropriate or irrelevant. This depends on the context, as do several other possibilities: Sometimes "I don't know" is an acceptable answer, sometimes even a right answer. The same is true of "None of the above" and "There is no answer." An answer is the, or a, right answer, if it presents This article is primarily concerned with truth as it is used in the evaluation of propositions. For example, The world is a sphere is true. When used in this way, it is properly contrasted with false. Truth is a concept of primary importance to philosophy, science, law, and religion. See... true information which falls within the determined range of alternatives. Questions of this simplest sort usually begin with Who, what, which, where, when, does/do, is/are.

Other questions do not so easily fit this mold. For example, questions beginning "Why" and "How" often request any information at all that will alleviate certain confusion in a person who wants to ask that question. Here the manner in which the information is presented might be more important than which information is presented; the questioner may even already know all of the information contained in the right answer, and merely needs it to be expressed in a more useful form.

Learning

Questions are used from the most elementary stage of learning to original research. In the The scientific method or process is fundamental to the scientific investigation and acquisition of new knowledge based upon physical evidence. Scientists propose new assertions about our world in the form of theories: observations, hypotheses, and deductions. Predictions from these theories are tested by experiment. If a prediction turns out to... scientific method, a question often forms the basis of the investigation and can be considered a transition between the observation and hypothesis stages. Students of all ages use questions in their learning of topics, and the skill of having learners creating "investigatable" questions is a central part of Inquiry education (sometimes known as the inquiry method) is a student-centered method of education focused on asking questions. Students are encouraged to ask questions which are meaningful to them, and which do not necessarily have easy answers; teachers are encouraged to avoid speaking at all when this is possible... inquiry education. The This article is about the ancient Greek philosopher. For the Byzantine church historian, see Socrates Scholasticus; for the Brazilian football player, see Sócrates (football player). Socrates Socrates (June 4, 470 – 399 BC) (Greek Σωκράτης Sōkrátēs) was... Socratic method of questioning student responses may be used by a teacher to lead the student towards the truth without direct instruction, and also helps students to form logical conclusions.

See also

The Logic of Questions and Answers (1976), by Nuel D. Belnap and Thomas B. Steele.