The Curious Missing Question Mark

Max Stearns

I recently noticed a strange punctuation habit in my own writing. Once I saw it, I realized I also had observed it far more broadly.

Consider the following email request earlier (sent sadly) today to one of my law school’s terrific librarians:

Hi Sue:

Can you please send me the Baltimore Sun article on the College Park layoffs.

Thanks, and I hope you are well.

Max

The lead sentence is plainly a question. Or at least it certainly looks like one. It begins with "Can you," and conventional grammar would insist such a sentence conclude with a question mark.

It’s not that this didn’t occur to me. It very much did. And yet I ended with a period.

After hitting “send,” I thought more about this. I realized that I experienced a discomfort at the prospect of making the sentence grammatical in the ordinary sense. Somehow ending with a question mark seemed not merely wrong, but troubling.

Why?

I considered first whether this might be my own personal quirk. But as I thought more about it, I realized this deliberate ungrammatical construction is not uncommon. It seems increasingly common among people who do what I do for a living—professors. And we are grammar nerds. I’ve also seen this more broadly among people with somewhat fancy credentials—lawyers, doctors, other academics, administrators, librarians, and more. And the pattern isn’t random. It is increasingly common among those who write what appears formally as an interrogative form of request yet with a period rather than question mark as the ending of the (non)inquiry.

I became intrigued—asking ChatGPT for some input—because this seemed different from the other linguistic transformations I’ve observed, which often begin from an initial misuse or misunderstanding.

A personal favorite: The increasing use of "concerning." I long suspected that its now ubiquitous replacement for "disconcerting" began simply in error. People meant one thing, said another similar sounding yet simpler word, and eventually the new usage (from “having to do with” to “notably disturbing”) attached legitimacy through repetition, especially among people with broad audiences, including CNN broadcasters, et tu Jake!

Whether my account is correct or not, and I’ll confess to an email exchange with a notable linguist who disagreed (I’ll also admit my stubborn persistence here!), this illustrates a familiar pattern of linguistic change. I don’t think that’s what I’m observing with the phantom question mark.

I never doubted my sentence was formally a question. I had no confusion concerning the grammar. Yet somehow following with proper punctuation made me uncomfortable, and so I did not.

Enter ChatGPT. Chat introduced me to a linguistic term that contributes to an ongoing sense that in another life, maybe I’d be a linguist: illocutionary.

Apparently, this derives from speech-act theory, developed by philosophers such as J. L. Austin and John Searle (cites and links below). The basic insight is that speaking conveys more than things said. Things said convey multiple different things.

Start with J.L. Austin, who distinguished three meanings of an utterance:

First the locutionary act: what the sentence literally says.

Second the illocutionary act: what the speaker is doing in saying it.

Third the perlocutionary act: the utterance effect on the listener.

Back to my email to Sue:

Locutionarily, I asked a question: Can you send me the article? Illocutionarily, however, I wasn’t. I had no doubt as to Sue's obvious professional capabilities. I was making a request: Please send me the article. And perlocutionarily, I anticipated the result that shortly after my sending the request, she’d send the article, as of course she did.

This new framing made me realize something that I can’t now unsee:

Traditionally, punctuation tracks grammatical form. Questions get question marks. But now I see what else is happening. Here the period is not tracking the sentence's grammatical structure, but it is conveying the sentence’s communicative function.

The sentence looks like a question, but it acts as a request. The period quietly acknowledges that distinction.

My discomfort from letting grammar drive my punctuation here is that the question mark would wrongly imply a genuine inquiry, as if I’m asking, do you have the capacity to perform this task. Obviously, that’s silly. The real issue is whether she will, and asking that of a professional with whom I have a long working relationship likewise is silly. The question mark seems oddly performative, whereas the period conveys a desire to politely ask for something to be done in the formal manner of a question, but with the understanding on both sides of a request to be fulfilled.

I asked Chat its impressions of a technical theory I had as to how this unfolded. Because I work with game theory and social choice, this theory maps onto much of how I view the world. There is an interesting path dependence in all this.

Think about text messaging. It long ago dispensed with terminal punctuation. A request often appears simply as:

Hoping you can join for dinner

How are you

Would 5 pm work

No punctation at all. The idea is that the texting invites an ongoing conversation; the non-punctuation signals hoping to continue; punctuation risks conveying a desire to close.

But email communication, on the other hand, needs sentences to end. Otherwise, it would be awkward to transition from one sentence to the next. And so writers must elect some form of closing punctuation. In performative inquiries like “can you send me this article,” the question mark feels overly interrogative. A period becomes the default, the only practical alternative.

If this is right, punctuation itself might be coevolving with the meaning of words in a manner that tracks not just syntax but speech acts. The dot at the end of the sentence signals what the speaker is doing no less than the formal wording conveys syntactic meaning.

Perhaps others have already discovered what I am finding. Chat seems to think I’ve got an original insight. I don't know. If you do, I’d love to have you teach me. Would you please comment.

A note: ChatGPT pointed me toward speech-act theory, associated principally with J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words (1962), and later developed by John Searle in Speech Acts (1969).