Exploring Exhaustivity in Wh-Questions through Analysis of Natural Language Usage

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-950-6_36How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Question answering; Exhaustivity; Pragmatics; Hearer interpre-tation; Linguistic context; Speaker intention

Abstract

This study investigates the psychological factors that influence how a hearer interprets a speaker’s intention in response to a question. The analysis focuses on wh-questions and the extent of exhaustivity required to fulfill the speaker’s communicative goal. While previous re-search suggests that such questions typically elicit exhaustive answers, the findings presented here indicate that exhaustivity is not an inherent property of the question itself. Question paraphrase ratings were collected across varied linguistic contexts to support this conclusion. The results highlight the significance of both linguistic and discourse-level considerations—particularly the hearer’s assessment of the speaker’s in-tent—in shaping the interpretation of meaning in question-answer ex-changes.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Raghab Singh
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/29
TI  - Exploring Exhaustivity in Wh-Questions through Analysis of Natural Language Usage
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Smart Systems and Social Management (ICSSSM 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 536
EP  - 548
SN  - 1951-6851
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-950-6_36
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-950-6_36
ID  - Singh2025
ER  -