Question mark followed by a comma or semi colon in a list

Punctuation is a matter of style, and as such you should be guided by your manual of style, either the one you've chosen or the one thrust upon you. I use the Chicago Manual of Style, which advises the following:

  1. Do not place rhetorical or hypothetical questions in quotes.
  2. When two consecutive marks coincide, retain only the stronger (except in cases not applicable here, which involve quotation marks, dashes, parentheses, and brackets).
  3. An initial capital for such questions is the author's choice, but generally, "the more formal the question, the more usual" the capital
  4. Do not use a colon before a list that serves as a complement or object.

This leaves you with

The main questions addressed in the literature are who said it? what does it mean? and does it all make sense?


The last explanation here is the most to the point: go by a manual of style. However, the example is an incorrect rendering of the Chicago manual. First, the answer to your question is "no"--with the exception of the hyphen (as you see here, a quotation mark followed by a hyphen). Second, since the sentence which has the questions within it is not a question, it should not end with a question mark. Third, you do not need to have the question marks within the sentence, because we are told they are questions and the first words contain who, what, and does. Thus the sentence should be written as follows:

The main questions addressed in the literature are who said it, what does it mean, and does it all make sense.

Always keep in mind whether your (bracketing) sentence is a question or a statement. That rules your choice of the final punctuation mark. For basic rules in a small book which is well respected for many years now, see: Strunk and White. Some things may have changed but the logic of grammar remains the same.