" What is the frequency allowed for a medical service"? Or "

[emsr2d2]

I was talking about the lack of, and then the position of, the question mark. If you want to know if you can ask someone a question, the question mark has to come inside the quotation marks.

Can I say "How many times can a procedure be performed?"

The question mark forms part of the question you want to ask the insurance rep.

We have debated on this forum before the use of two question marks in such a context. Ideally, there would be a question mark after "How many times can a procedure be performed" and one to conclude the "Can I say" section. They are both questions. That would lead to:

Can I say "How many times can a procedure be performed?"?

To me, that looks awful but I know that some people would write it that way, but some would omit the final question mark. When said aloud, the spoken questioning intonation would come from "... procedure be performed?" so it would be clear from the intonation and the opening words "Can I say" that the whole thing is a question. It's when it's written that it becomes tricky.

 

[Rover_KE]

I don't recall ever seeing two question marks in print (or even a full stop after an embedded quoted question).

 

[emsr2d2]

I don't recall ever seeing two question marks in print (or even a full stop after an embedded quoted question).

I don't think you'll find anyone arguing for the use of a full stop after any quotation marks that enclose anything that ends with a closing punctuation mark.

 

[GoesStation]

I did say I was in a minority - possibly of one.

I believe this is one of the somewhat rare cases where you and jutfrank are in agreement. I'm not — I think it looks terrible. I can imagine that convention in a linguistics context, but not anywhere else.

 

[jutfrank]

We agree on far more things than we disagree on.

Agreed. It's just that members tend to notice more when we disagree.

In fact, we disagree only when he's wrong and I'm right.

;-)

I'm also a two-question-mark person, by the way, looking at it from a 'language' point of view rather than an 'editorial' point of view. There are two questions, so put two question marks. I understand that the only reason not to do that is for how it looks on the page.

I also think we should encourage tufguy (and other members) to avoid embedding questions inside questions in the first place. There are much clearer and easier ways of asking:

Can I ask the following sentence to an insurance rep?:

What is the frequency allowed for medical service?

 

[jutfrank]

That's how I feel. However, I am not totally consistent. For example, I write

Did he ask "Are you happy?"?
and
He didn't ask "Are you happy?".

But I write

He said "I am happy".
rather than
He said "I am happy.".

I'm with Emerson: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

I do the same, but I don't see that as inconsistent. If you don't mind, I'll explain how I personally see all this:

In my view, the question mark and the full stop are categorically different things.

The question mark for me is above all a mark of meaning—it's primarily there to show that the speaker has a question in mind. It's related only statistically to the interrogative sentence type in that the vast majority of interrogative sentences are questions—but not all, in which cases I usually resist adding a question mark. There are also often times when speakers ask clear questions with declarative sentences (They do?) and times when they ask a question without even using a sentence (What?). So for me, there is also a categorical difference between questions (illocutionary acts) and interrogative sentences (grammatical forms).

The full stop is just a way to separate utterances (not sentences) from each other in print. If the aim of a text is to show a single sentence/utterance, there doesn't really need to be a full stop (as evinced in the customs of linguistics textbooks). For precisely this reason, I would not use the first full stop in He said "I am happy.". There's absolutely no need for it because there's nothing to separate, the quoted part being a single utterance.

The reason we use full stops at the end of non-sentence utterances on this forum has nothing to do with any language rule and everything to do with encouraging learners to get into the habit of using them.