Why We Need a Question Semantics

In this paper I discuss the role that question contents should play in an overall account of language, thought, and communication. Based on these considerations, I argue against the Fregean view that analyzes questions as distinguished only at the level of force. Questions, I argue, are associated with specific semantic objects, which play a distinctive role in thought and in compositional semantics, stand in logical relations to one another, and can act as contents of multiple speech acts. In the second part of the paper, I present a recent approach to the semantics of questions – inquisitive semantics – and discuss how the notion of question content it provides can be fruitfully put to use in the different roles we identified.