question under discussion

{{Short description|Self-explanatory article}}

In semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, a question under discussion (QUD) is a question which the interlocutors in a discourse are attempting to answer. In many formal and computational theories of discourse, the QUD (or an ordered set of QUD's) is among the elements of a tuple called the conversational scoreboard which represents the current state of the conversation. Craige Roberts introduced the concept of a QUD in 1996 in order to formalize conversational relevance and explain its consequences for information structure and focus marking. It has subsequently become a staple of work in semantics and pragmatics, playing a role in analyses of disparate phenomena including donkey anaphora and presupposition projection.{{cite encyclopedia |last1=Beaver |first1= David | last2=Geurts |first2=Bart| last3=Denlinger | first3=Kristie | editor-last1=Zalta |editor-first1=Edward |encyclopedia=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |title= Presupposition |url= https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/presupposition/ |access-date=2021-03-05 |year=2021}}{{cite journal |last1=Partee |first1=Barbara |author-link=Barbara Partee | date=2009 |title= Lecture 10: Focus and Information Structure: Semantics and Pragmatics |url=https://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2009/materials/MGU0910.pdf |journal=Course Notes, Moscow State University}}{{cite journal |last1=Anderbois |first1=Scott |title=The QUD Model of Discourse |url=http://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci2951-k/papers/QUD_Lecture_Robotics.pdf |journal=Course Notes, Brown University}}{{cite journal |last1=Roberts |first1=Craige |orig-year=1996|year=2012 |title= Information structure: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics |url=https://semprag.org/index.php/sp/article/view/sp.5.6/pdf |journal=Semantics and Pragmatics |volume=5|doi=10.3765/sp.5.6 |doi-access=free |hdl=1811/81500 |hdl-access=free }}