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Yes-no question


In linguistics, a yes–no question, formally known as a polar question, is a question whose expected answer is either "yes" or "no". Formally, they present an exclusive disjunction, a pair of alternatives of which only one is acceptable. In English, such questions can be formed in both positive and negative forms (e.g. "Will you be here tomorrow?" and "Won't you be here tomorrow?").

Yes–no questions are in contrast with non-polar wh-questions, with the five Ws, which do not necessarily present a range of alternative answers, or necessarily restrict that range to two alternatives. (Questions beginning with "which", for example, often presuppose a set of several alternatives, from which one is to be drawn.)

Yes–no questions are formed in various ways in various languages. In English, a special word order (verb–subject–object) is used to form yes–no questions. In the Greenlandic language, yes–no questions are formed with a special verb morphology. In Latin, yes–no questions are indicated by the addition of a special grammatical particle or an enclitic. In some languages, such as in Modern Greek, Portuguese, and the Jakaltek language, the only way to distinguish a yes–no question from a simple declarative statement is the rising question intonation used when saying the question. (Such questions are labelled declarative questions and are also available as an option in those languages that have other ways of asking yes–no questions.) The use of rising question intonation in yes–no questions is one of the universals of human languages.


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