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A question is refered to as a yes-no question when the person responding is expected to answer yes or no (e.g. Are you feeling better?). as opposed to the way one supplies information in answering a question such as What is todays date? Problems fo learners Yes-no question formation in English is often difficult for beginning ESL/EFL students to master. English forms yes-no questions by means of inversion-so do some other languages, such as German, but generally their inversion rule is simpler than the english one. An analysis of yes-no questions Consider the following yes-no questions: 1. Are the children playing in the yard? 2. Will John study linguistics? 3. Has Alice gone home? 4. Were you able to see George? Yes-no questions in English have only one auxiliary element to the left of the subject NP/Furthermore., the auxiliary that is moved to sentence initial position is the auxiliary which occupies the first position in the sequence of auxiliaries in the base structure. The Q marker which appears in the basic structure is a sentence marker which calls for the yes-no question transformation (i.e. subject/auxiliary inversion). Sentence : Had Mark seen the later? S SM Q NP N NUC AUX tense perf V VP NP
Mark
past
HAVE
EN
see
det The
N letter
WH-QUESTIONS
Wh-questions are a complex topic because of the variety of wh-question types in English and because some of them are definitely harder to learn than others. In some traditional grammars, yes-no questions are called general question because the whole preposition is being questioned. Consider the following sentences: Dis someone walk the dog? Who walked the dog?
Types of wh-questions
There are at least nine different types that you should be aware of: 1. Subject NP: what happened? Who left? 2. Object NP: Who(m) did you see? What did you do? 3. Object of a preposition: who(m) did you talk to?/To whom did you talk? 4. Adverbials of time, place, manner, reason, and means: When did you leave? Why is he laughing? Where did you go? How did he get to the party? (by bus) How did she dance? (gracefully) 5. Demonstrative determiners: What Book do you want? Which 6. Possesive determiners: whose book is that? 7. Quantity determiners: How many cars does she have? How much wine did he drink? 8. Intensifier : How smart is she? How fast can he run? 9. Adjective phrase (state, condition): How are you?
Someone + Q past
something + Q The transformational rules needed to derive this wh-question are: Output of base: that object pres BE something + Q Whreplacement: that object pres BE what Wh-fronting: what that object pres BE Subject/auxiliary inversion: what pres BE that object Affix attachment (1X): what BE + pres that object Subject-verb agreement and morphological rules: what is that object?
Uninverted wh-questions
It should perhaps also be mentioned that wh-fronting and subject/auxiliary inversion may be supressed in certain wh-questions that express surprise or disbelief.
Negative wh-questions
Negative wh-questions that question something in the predicate also have two different surface forms depending on whether NOT contraction has taken place.
Article Usage
For this aspect of article usage we have to consider the discourse context (i.e. how familiar the speaker/writer is (and thinks the listener/reader is) with the noun(s) being mentioned).