Despite questions having a long-standing history in theoretical linguistics, the interface between empirically grounded corpus linguistics of questioning behaviour and analytically driven pragmatic theory of question structure and context has received significantly less attention. This paper aims to contribute to this field of research by showing that a four-way categorisation into question types, namely, pure questioning, assertive questioning, rhetorical questioning and challenge questioning, allows us to capture and represent questions in over two million words in natural language argumentative dialogue. In this type of dialogue questioning has been claimed to serve as the engine that drives the shape and development of a discourse. Our investigation covers three genres of argumentative discourse in which questions play a key role, namely political debates, moral dilemmas and sessions of participatory deliberative democracy. Through deep algorithmic analysis of the data, we test a variety of hypotheses from argumentation and linguistic theory, clearly demonstrating for the first time that (particular types of) questions directly catalyse argument structure and that the illocutionary consequences of non-canonical questions are much more varied than previously thought.

尽管问题在理论语言学中有着悠久的历史，但以实证为基础的提问行为语料库语言学与问题结构和语境的分析驱动的语用理论之间的接口却很少受到关注。本文旨在通过表明对问题类型的四向分类，即纯粹提问、断言提问、修辞提问和挑战提问，使我们能够以自然语言捕捉和表示超过 200 万个单词的问题，从而为这一研究领域做出贡献。语言辩论对话。在这种类型的对话中，提问被认为是推动话语形成和发展的引擎。我们的调查涵盖了三种类型的争论性话语，其中问题起着关键作用，即政治辩论、道德困境和参与式协商民主会议。通过对数据的深度算法分析，我们测试了论证和语言理论的各种假设，首次清楚地证明了（特定类型的）问题直接催化了论证结构，并且非规范问题的言外后果要多得多。与之前想象的不同。