Glossary term Y

Yes-No Question

A yes-no question is a question for which an answer of yes or no is acceptable.

In some languages, a yes-no question is formally distinguished by features, such as

  • rising sentence-final intonation
  • a sentence-initial or sentence-final particle
  • verb morphology
  • a difference of word order, such as the placement of the verb closer to the beginning of the sentence than in the declarative sentence, and
  • an interrogative clitic that attaches to the item in the sentence that is being questioned.

 

  1. Elson and Pickett 1988, 108
  2. Crystal 1980, 294, 387
  3. Lyons 1977b, 754
  4. Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik 1985, 806
  5. Sadock and Zwicky 1985, 181–182
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