**5. Conclusion**

We have considered the differences between questions and requests, and their co-presence in the structure of queries.

Because of the so-called "descriptive fallacy" in philosophy of language, it took rather a long time to give them the attention they were due. Thanks to pragmatics, this oversight has been rectified.

Asking questions testifies to the strong relationship between lack of determinacy (poverty, both in knowledge and in action) and the need to overcome it (in order to attain plentifulness). Interrogative structures are devices where triggers such as *wh*-words or suspended assent are at work to retrieve missing information, extract knowledge, or receive the cooperation requested.

Answers are therefore not only assertions, but also permissions, prohibitions, orders, suggestions, etc. The logico-linguistic structure which is always required across this variety of speech acts and which makes possible the wording of questions and requests is predication.

Even in elliptical or simply verbless sentences, predication is at work albeit implicit or implied. To be at work means that it is a necessary condition for the complete efficiency and comprehensibility of the sentence itself. To be at work, then, means that the addressee/hearer/reader has to bear in mind, or retrieve, the predication, where the absence of recognition would prevent him/her from understanding the meaning, i.e. the

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logicians, linguists and other scholars, aware of the multi-secular history of human thought on these topics, can now also carry out field-work. Mutual advantage is

semantics of the sentence. In crosstalk such as "Ready?" "Not yet.", no verb appears, but predication is easily recognisable, as implicit (in the question) or implied (in the answer): Implicit, specifically as *a part of* the first turn "[Are you] ready?", and implied as *the whole* turn upon which negation operates. The role of negation is in fact that of an operator, the scope of which is the whole preceding sentence structure: [It is] not yet [true that I am ready]", i.e. the preceding sentence deprived of its interrogative mood, that is to say without the suspension of assent typical of oriented questions, and shifted to the second person (addressee) to the first one (sender).

During our reconstruction of the basic views on such an evergreen topic in logic and linguistic inquiries as predication, we have argued that some routes need to be modified:


logicians, linguists and other scholars, aware of the multi-secular history of human thought on these topics, can now also carry out field-work. Mutual advantage is expected.
