Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 345
from
Brown Corpus
As a word of caution, we should be aware that in actual practice no message is purely one of the four types, question, command, statement, or exclamation.
For example, suppose a man wearing a $200 watch, driving a 1959 Rolls Royce, stops to ask a man on the sidewalk, `` What time is it ''??
This sentence would have most of the characteristics of a question, but it has some of the characteristics of a statement because the questioner has conveyed the fact that he has no faith in his own timepiece or the one attached to his car.
Also, since the man questioned feels a strong compulsion to answer ( and thereby avoid the consequences of being thought queer ) the question has assumed some measurable properties of a command.
However, for convenience we will stick to the idea that information can be classified according to Table 1.
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