Korean has so-called indeterminate words (cf. Kuroda 1965) that can be used as either interrogatives or indefinites depending on the context. For instance, the indeterminate word nwukwu is ambiguous between an interrogative reading ‘who’ and an indefinite reading ‘someone’. Thus the sentence in (1) has three different interpretations: i) an assertion with an indefinite, ii) a yes-no question wi...

A relevant and functional ontology continues to be one of the bottlenecks to the process of building epistemic agent-oriented systems. While the construction of electronic ontologies is the focus of many ongoing efforts, ontology building in a timely manner remains an obstacle. Our current focus is directed toward the notion of automated identification of ontological artifacts from interrogativ...

We present here a perceptual analysis of Brazilian Portuguese prosody expressing eleven different attitudes using an interrogative mode. The attitudes are separated between 6 social, and 4 propositional expressions plus a neutral expression, and are performed by two native speakers (a female and a male). An earlier work studied the declarative mode. The aim of the current study is to perceptual...

Previous analyses on friendly speech were made using dialogues without differentiating their linguistic functions. This paper reports an analysis on declarative and interrogative sentences respectively. Pitch and duration of prosodic words were statistically analyzed and compared concerning factors of their positions and stresses. Based on the acoustic investigation of friendly speech, tonal pi...

We present a new approach to a sentence of interrogative form in Japanese within the framework of Montague Grammar. The possibility of various uses of an interrogative sentence; uses as a question, an exclamation, a rhetorical question, a demand and a recommendation is explained based on the same denotation for the sentence. The denotation which is neutral for all possible uses is defined in te...

The primary goal of this paper is to investigate whether interrogative suggestibility is related to certain personality traits in an Estonian sample of subjects (N = 61; 20 men and 41 women; mean age = 20.6 years; SD = 2.98) as well as to explore whether some facial characteristics (mood-related and/or trait-related) of persons belonging to this sample can be related to perceived or real sugges...