Yes-or-no_question | TriviaQuestions.online

⭐ In the context of intonation, a yes-or-no question can be distinguished from an alternative question primarily by…

The way pitch rises and falls on specific words within a question fundamentally changes its interpretation, signaling whether it seeks a simple 'yes' or 'no' response or a choice between options.

⭐ Core Definition: Yes-or-no question

In linguistics, a yes–no question, also known as a binary question, a polar question, or a general question, is a closed-ended question whose expected answer is one of two choices, one that provides an affirmative answer to the question versus one that provides a negative answer to the question. Typically, the choices are either "yes" or "no" in English. Yes–no questions present an exclusive disjunction, namely a pair of alternatives of which only one is a felicitous answer. In English, such questions can be formed in both positive and negative forms:

positive yes/no question: "Will you be here tomorrow?"
negative yes/no question: "Won't you be here tomorrow?"

Yes–no questions are in contrast with non-polar wh-questions. The latter are also called content questions, and are formed with the five Ws plus an H ("who", "what", "where", "when", "why", "how"). Rather than restricting the range of possible answers to two alternatives, content questions are compatible with a broad range of alternative answers. For example, questions beginning with "who", involve a set of several alternatives, from which one is to be drawn; in this respect, they are open-ended questions. In contrast, yes–no questions are closed-ended questions, as they only permit one of two answers, namely "yes" or "no".

↓ Menu

👉 Yes-or-no question in the context of Intonation (linguistics)

In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features. Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words (as in Mandarin) or to mark grammatical features (as in Kinyarwanda).

↓ Explore More Topics