Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Dilbert, with Dilbert and the pointy-headed boss:

Well, responding to a yes-no question with a question could just be a request for information — that would be taking the boss’s question “at face value” — but quite often the second question (conversationally) implicates that the answer to the first question is “yes” (why, the reasoning begins, would the second question have been asked in the first place?)

This entry was posted on October 2, 2014 at 5:10 am and is filed under Discourse, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Speech acts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.