I argued that the meaning of a question should be identified with its resolution conditions, rather than with its set of “basic semantic answers”, as traditional approaches had it.

As a result, questions will express issues, in the sense of inquisitive semantics, that is, downward closed sets of propositions.

On the one hand, this allows us to deal elegantly with question entailment and coordination, by means of general type-theoretic notions, just as desired by Groenendijk&Stokhof.

On the other hand, we need not assume that questions have always exactly one true complete answer. We can thus deal gracefully with classes of questions that are problematic for a partition approach, such as mention-some, choice, and conditional questions.

Thus, this simple shift in perspective allows us to reconcile the conceptual and formal advantages of Groenendijk&Stokhof’s theory with the greater generality provided by proposition-set theories such as Bennett&Belnap’s.

 

References:

Ivano Ciardelli, Question meaning=resolution conditions, 2013.
Slides for a presentation at the QID workshop in Amsterdam.