Questions and Answers

Abstract

I shall be concerned in this paper with a tripartite classification of interrogative sentences which is all too familiar to us. There are questions that contain an interrogative pronoun or adverb and that have the inflected form of the verb in ‘normal’ second position, such as Where did you buy this?, and there are questions with the inflected verb-form in first position, which do not contain an interrogative word. Such questions can again be divided into two sorts, differentiated by the presence or absence of a disjunction, and, where this is not sufficient, by different intonation patterns. Examples are Did you catch the train? and Did he take the bus or did he come by train? This is the syntactic basis for differentiating between so-called wh-questions, on the one hand, and alternative and yes/no-questions on the other.