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An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask ... which serves to convert a statement into a yes–no question, without having any other meaning.
But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question". [1] A 1970 Dear Abby column in The Milwaukee Sentinel said: "There is no such thing as a stupid question if it's sincere. Better to ask and risk appearing stupid than to continue on your ignorant way and make a stupid mistake.
A rhetorical question is a question asked for a purpose other than to obtain information. [1] In many cases it may be intended to start a discourse, as a means of displaying or emphasizing the speaker's or author's opinion on a topic.
In linguistics, a yes–no question, also known as a binary question, a polar question, or a general question, [1] or closed-ended question is a question whose expected answer is one of two choices, one that provides an affirmative answer to the question versus one that provides a negative answer to the question.
"Spending the summer traveling around India is a great idea, but it does beg the question of how we can afford it." [38] Sometimes it is further confused with "dodging the question", an attempt to avoid it, or perhaps more often begging the question is simply used to mean leaving the question unanswered. [9]
Linguistically, a question may be defined on three levels. At the level of semantics, a question is defined by its ability to establish a set of logically possible answers. [1] At the level of pragmatics, a question is an illocutionary category of speech act which seeks to obtain information from the addressee. [1]
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. [2] For example, in the English language , the words begin , start , commence , and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous .
A question like this, which has the same form (except for intonation) as a declarative sentence, is called a declarative question. In some languages this is the only available way of forming yes–no questions – they lack a way of marking such questions grammatically, and thus do so using intonation only.