On The Logical Semantic Of Questions

One of the core concepts in classical logic theory is proposition which traditionally corresponds to indicatives in the natural language.However,indicatives is not the only syntactic form in the natural language,while we know interrogatives is also one of the important forms that people often use.Some examples show that interrogatives can influence contexts,and we could find some constant relations between interrogatives.It indicates that if we can successfully provide the semantic interpretation for interrogatives and take account of indicatives and interrogatives based on the same semantic framework,then it will strengthen the expressive power of the logic.Based on that,the dissertation takes the semantics of interrogatives as the theme,and analyses semantic theories that has had an important influence since 1950's.The discussion of these makes up for the lack of the domestic researches which has been almost stopped since 1990's.Now,our works will narrow the gap,making the domestic research on this theme cutting-edge.By analyzing and discussing,we hold that inquisitive semantics can solve two troublesome problems.First,it can equally illustrate indicatives and interrogatives.Second,it fits the logical operation very well.However,we have different views on some details such as the understanding of the context updating and the translation from interrogatives in the natural language to the logical language.Additionally,this dissertation consists of six chapters.Chapter 1 clarifies the background that why we concentrate on the semantic of questions,and represents the relevant literatures.It then points out its significance and outlines the overall framework of the dissertation.Chapter 2 discusses some basic concepts about questions,including terminologies,the classification,relations between the question and the answer,and some basic principles and restrictions.Chapter 3 deals with several classical semantic theories of questions,which have been raised since 1950 s,such as answer set theory,partition semantics,constructive semantic,imperative-epistemic theory,subject-request theory,interrogative model of inquiry,and inferential erotetic logic.Chapter 4 delineates inquisitive semantics in more depth.As a new semantic framework,it attempts to formalize traditional propositions and questions in a united way,as well as entailment,context that related to questions.Chapter 5 illustrates that inquisitive semantics is successful to describe the questions in natural language.For illustrating,we use both English and Chinese sentences,which indicates that inquisitive semantics can translate interrogatives of different language into logic form in the same way.Then,the chapter also shows how to use inquisitive semantics to interpret the first-order language.Chapter 6 summarizes the main contents of the dissertation,and points out the orientation in future works.