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Aninterrogative clause is aclause whose form is typically associated withquestion-like meanings. For instance, the Englishsentence "Is Hannah sick?" has interrogative syntax which distinguishes it from itsdeclarative counterpart "Hannah is sick". Also, the additionalquestion mark closing the statement assures that the reader is informed of the interrogative mood. Interrogative clauses may sometimes be embedded within a phrase, for example: "Paul knows who is sick", where the interrogative clause "who is sick" serves ascomplement of the embedding verb "know".
Languages vary in how they form interrogatives. When a language has a dedicated interrogativeinflectional form, it is often referred to asinterrogativegrammatical mood.[1] Interrogative mood or other interrogative forms may be denoted by theglossing abbreviationINT.
Interrogative sentences are generally divided betweenyes–no questions, which ask whether or not something is the case (and invite an answer of theyes/no type), andwh-questions, which specify the information being asked about using a word likewhich,who,how, etc.
An intermediate form is thechoice question,disjunctive question oralternative question, which presents a number of alternative answers, such as "Do you want tea or coffee?"
Negative questions are formed fromnegative sentences, as in "Aren't you coming?" and "Why does he not answer?"
Tag questions are questions "tagged" onto the end of sentences to invite confirmation, as in "She left earlier,didn't she?"
Indirect questions (orinterrogative content clauses) aresubordinate clauses used within sentences to refer to a question (as opposed todirect questions, which are interrogative sentences themselves). An example of an indirect question iswhere Jack is in the sentence "I wonder where Jack is." English and many other languages do not useinversion in indirect questions, even though they would in the corresponding direct question ("Where is Jack?"), as described in the following section.
Languages may use bothsyntax andprosody to distinguish interrogative sentences (which pose questions) fromdeclarative sentences (which state propositions). Syntax refers to grammatical changes, such as changingword order or adding question words; prosody refers to changes inintonation while speaking. Some languages also mark interrogativesmorphologically, i.e. by inflection of the verb. A given language may use one or more of these methods in combination.
Certain languages mark interrogative sentences by using a particularinflection of the verb (this may be described as an interrogativemood of the verb). Languages with some degree of this feature includeIrish,Scottish Gaelic,Greenlandic,Nenets,Central Alaskan Yup'ik,Turkish,Finnish,Korean andVenetian.
In most varieties ofVenetian, interrogative verb endings have developed out of what was originally a subjectpronoun, placed after the verb in questions by way of inversion (see following section). For example, Old Venetianmagnè-vu? ("do you eat?", formed by inversion fromvu magnè "you eat") has developed into the modernmagneto? ormagnèu?. This form can now also be used withovert subjects:Voaltri magnèo co mi? ("do you eat with me?", literally "you eat-you with me?").
InTurkish, the verb takes the interrogative particlemı (alsomi, mu, mü according to the last vowel of the word – seevowel harmony), with other personal or verbal suffixes following after that particle:
InCentral Alaskan Yup'ik, verbs are conjugated in what is called the interrogative mood if one wishes to pose a content question:
Yes/no questions in Yup'ik, however, are formed by attaching the enclitic-qaa to the end of the first word of the sentence, which is what is being questioned:
Further details on verb inflection can be found in the articles on the languages listed above (or their grammars).
The mainsyntactic devices used in various languages for marking questions are changes inword order and addition ofinterrogative words or particles.
In some modern Western European languages, questions are marked by switching the verb with the subject (inversion), thus changing the canonicalword order pattern fromSVO toVSO. For example, inGerman:
Similar patterns are found in otherGermanic languages andFrench. In the case ofModern English, inversion is used, but can only take place with a limited group of verbs (calledauxiliaries or "special verbs"). In sentences where no such verb is otherwise present, the auxiliarydo (does,did) is introduced to enable the inversion (for details seedo-support, andEnglish grammar § Questions. Formerly, up to the late 16th century, English used inversion freely with all verbs, as German still does.) For example:
An inverted subject pronoun may sometimes develop into a verb ending, as described in the previous section with regard to Venetian.
Another common way of marking questions is with the use of agrammatical particle or anenclitic, to turn a statement into a yes–no question enquiring whether that statement is true. A particle may be placed at the beginning or end of the sentence, or attached to an element within the sentence. Examples of interrogative particles typically placed at the start of the sentence include the Frenchest-ce que andPolishczy. (The English wordwhether behaves in this way too, but is used inindirect questions only.) The constructed languageEsperanto uses the particleĉu, which operates like the Polishczy:
Particles typically placed at the end of the question includeJapaneseかka andMandarin吗ma. These are illustrated respectively in the following examples:
Enclitic interrogative particles, typically placed after the first (stressed) element of the sentence, which is generally the element to which the question most strongly relates, include theRussianлиli, and theLatinnē (sometimes justn in early Latin). For example:[2]
Thisne usually forms a neutral yes–no question, implying neither answer (except where the context makes it clear what the answer must be). However Latin also forms yes–no questions withnonne, implying that the questioner thinks the answer to be the affirmative, and withnum, implying that the interrogator thinks the answer to be the negative. Examples:num negāre audēs? ("You dare not deny, do you?";Catullus 1,4,8);Mithridātēs nōnne ad Cn. Pompeium lēgātum mīsit? ("Didn't Mithridates send an ambassador to Gnaeus Pompey?";Pompey 16,46).[3]
InIndonesian andMalay, the particle-kah is appended as a suffix, either to the last word of a sentence, or to the word or phrase that needs confirmation (that word or phrase being brought to the start of the sentence). In more formal situations, the question wordapakah (formed by appending-kah toapa, "what") is frequently used.
ForTurkish, where the interrogative particle may be considered a part of the verbal inflection system, see the previous section.
Another way of forming yes–no questions is theA-not-A construction, found for example inChinese,[2] which offers explicit yes or no alternatives:
Somewhat analogous to this is the method of asking questions in colloquialIndonesian, which is also similar to the use oftag questions ("..., right?", "..., no?", "..., isn't it?", etc.), as occur in English and many other languages:
Non-polar questions (wh-questions) are normally formed using aninterrogative word (wh-word) such aswhat,where,how, etc. This generally takes the place in the syntactic structure of the sentence normally occupied by the information being sought. However, in terms of word order, the interrogative word (or the phrase it is part of) is brought to the start of the sentence (an example ofwh-fronting) in many languages. Such questions may also be subject to subject–verb inversion, as with yes–no questions. Some examples for English follow:
Howeverwh-fronting typically takes precedence over inversion: if the interrogative word is the subject or part of the subject, then it remains fronted, so inversion (which would move the subject after the verb) does not occur:
Not all languages havewh-fronting (and as for yes–no questions, inversion is not applicable in all languages). In Mandarin, for example, the interrogative word remains in its natural place (in situ) in the sentence:
This word order is also possible in English: "You didwhat?" (with rising intonation). (When there is more than one interrogative word, only one of them is fronted: "Who wants to order what?") It is also possible to make yes–no questions without any grammatical marking, using only intonation (or punctuation, when writing) to differentiate questions from statements – in some languages this is the only method available. This is discussed in the following section.
Questions may also be indicated by a differentintonation pattern. This is generally a pattern of rising intonation. It applies particularly to yes–no questions; the use of rising question intonation in yes–no questions has been suggested to be one of theuniversals of human languages.[4][5] Withwh-questions, however, rising intonation is not so commonly used – in English, questions of this type usually do not have such an intonation pattern.
The use of intonation to mark yes–no questions is often combined with the grammatical question marking described in the previous section. For example, in the English sentence "Are you coming?", rising intonation would be expected in addition to the inversion of subject and verb. However it is also possible to indicate a question by intonation alone.[6] For example:
A question like this, which has the same form (except for intonation) as a declarative sentence, is called adeclarative question. In some languages this is the only available way of forming yes–no questions – they lack a way of marking such questions grammatically, and thus do so using intonation only. Examples of such languages areItalian,Modern Greek,Portuguese, and theJakaltek language.[7] Similarly inSpanish, yes–no questions are not distinguished grammatically from statements (although subject–verb inversion takes place inwh-questions).
On the other hand, it is possible for a sentence to be marked grammatically as a question, but to lack the characteristic question intonation. This often indicates a question to which no answer is expected, as with arhetorical question. It occurs often in English intag questions, as in "It's too late, isn't it?" If the tag question ("isn't it") is spoken with rising intonation, an answer is expected (the speaker is expressing doubt), while if it is spoken with falling intonation, no answer is necessarily expected and no doubt is being expressed.
Sentences can also be marked as questions when they arewritten down. In languages written inLatin orCyrillic, as well as certain other scripts, aquestion mark at the end of the sentence identifies it as a question. In Spanish, an additionalinverted mark is placed at the beginning (e.g.¿Cómo está usted?). Question marks are also used in declarative questions, as in the example given above (in this case they are equivalent to the intonation used in speech, being the only indication that the sentence is meant as a question). Question marks are sometimes omitted in rhetorical questions (the sentence given in the previous paragraph, when used in a context where it would be spoken with falling intonation, might be written "It's too late, isn't it.", with no final question mark).
Responses to questions are often reduced toelliptical sentences rather than full sentences, since in many cases only the information specially requested needs to be provided. (SeeAnswer ellipsis.) Also many (but not all) languages have words that function like the English'yes' and 'no', used to give short answers to yes–no questions. In languages that do not have words compared to English 'yes' and 'no', e.g. Chinese, speakers may need to answer the question according to the question. For example, when asked喜歡喝茶嗎？ (Do you like tea?), one has to answer喜歡 (literally 'like') for affirmative or不喜歡 (literally 'not like') for negative. But when asked你打籃球嗎？ (Do you play basketball?), one needs to answer我打 (literally 'I play') for affirmative and我不打 (literally 'I don't play') for negative. There is no simple answering word for 'yes' and 'no' in Chinese. One needs to answer the yes–no question using the main verb in the question instead.
Responses to negative interrogative sentences can be problematic. In English, for example, the answer "No" to the question "You don't have a passport?" may confirm the negative, i.e. it means that the responder does not have a passport, but on the other hand, it can also imply that the responder does have a passport. Most often, a native speaker would also state an indicative sentence for clarification, i.e. "No, I don't have a passport," or even "No, I do have a passport," the latter most likely being used if the question were phrased, "Do you not have a passport?" which would connote serious doubt. However, in some other languages, such as Japanese, a negative answer to a negative question asserts the affirmative – in this case that the responder does have a passport. In English, "Yes" would most often assert the affirmative, though a simple, one-word answer could still be unclear, while in some other languages it would confirm the negative without doubt.[8]
Some languages have different words for "yes" when used to assert an affirmative in response to a negative question or statement; for example the Frenchsi, the Germandoch, andDanish,Swedish orNorwegianjo.
Ambiguity may also arise with choice questions.[9] A question like "Do you like tea or coffee?" can be interpreted as a choice question, to be answered with either "tea" or "coffee"; or it can be interpreted as a yes–no question, to be answered "yes (I do like tea or coffee)" or "no (I do not like tea or coffee)".
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The dictionary definition ofinterrogative at Wiktionary