Owens—Interrogative Thought—Means of Its Expression. 421 
of an inference, on which so important a linguistic act, as the 
question, can hardly be supposed to rely.* It may then rank as 
a foregone conclusion, that the speaker's desire to be informed 
will be accepted by the hearer, as part of what a question is in¬ 
tended to' express. Accordingly, in the question “Who killed 
Lincoln I feel sure that words employed will not only express 
that definition of my desideratum,, which resides in “killed Lin¬ 
coln/’ but will also in some way express as much, at least, as 
what might be expressed by “my desire that you tell me that 
desideratum.” 
Assertion of desire. 
Language is commonly defined as a means of conveying in* 
formation. To the student of interrogation it is, however, ob¬ 
vious that language is also a means of soliciting information. 
Of these two operations, the latter seems to me to presuppose 
the former. For surely I shall not conceive the extremely com¬ 
plex act of asking you to give me information, until I have con¬ 
ceived the vastly simpler act of merely giving information; and 
my conception of information-giving can hardly be supposed to 
have become availably distinct, until developed by realization in 
actual practice. If then one of the two (the ordinary statement 
and the question) be derived from the' other, the question is pre¬ 
sumably derived from the statement. Moreover, that a deriva- 
*That the question did at first rely on precisely such an inference, I 
regard as essentially beyond a doubt. The history of the compactor 
language-forms and those which express ideas of major difficulty, ex¬ 
hibits commonly an early stage in which even the dominant idea is left 
to inference. Thus, in “It rains. I shall however take a walk”, the an¬ 
tagonistic relation between the walking and the raining could not at 
first be felt as part of what is meant by “however”—a word initially ex¬ 
pressing only manner or condition indefinite to the utmost degree, beingt 
merely an essential synonym of “anyhow.” But in time this antago¬ 
nism, being constantly intended by the speaker, and constantly inferred 
by the hearer, came to be felt as part of what was actually expressed,, 
and elected the word “however” as its symbol, forcing that word to 
mean “in spite thereof” or “nevertheless.” So, too, in the case of the? 
question, what at one time was nothing more than occasional inference, 
came to be regular, was next accepted as part of meaning expressed, and 
finally elected, as I hope to show, a particular sentence-member as it® 
symbol. 
