Does a duck have antlers? Some pragmatics of “transparent questions”

This study tested experimentally certain pragmatic consequences of questions like “Is the Pope Catholic” and “Is the Pope Presbyterian.” Results indicate that such questions are interpreted transparently, so that the answer to the original question asked is taken to be the same as the obvious answer to the existentially unrelated question. Variations in the syntactic/semantic form of such questions and in the situation producing them also had consequences, specifically for judgments of the interpersonal attitude and interpersonal competence of the individual using such questions as responses.