  Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984, 1996; Groenendijk 1999) provide a logically
attractive theory of the semantics of natural language questions, commonly
referred to as the partition theory. Two central notions in this theory are
entailment between questions and answerhood. For example, the question "Who is
going to the party?" entails the question "Is John going to the party?", and
"John is going to the party" counts as an answer to both. Groenendijk and
Stokhof define these two notions in terms of partitions of a set of possible
worlds.
  We provide a syntactic characterization of entailment between questions and
answerhood . We show that answers are, in some sense, exactly those formulas
that are built up from instances of the question. This result lets us compare
the partition theory with other approaches to interrogation -- both linguistic
analyses, such as Hamblin's and Karttunen's semantics, and computational
systems, such as Prolog. Our comparison separates a notion of answerhood into
three aspects: equivalence (when two questions or answers are interchangeable),
atomic answers (what instances of a question count as answers), and compound
answers (how answers compose).

Computation and Language;Artificial Intelligence;Logic in Computer Science