11

C h a p t e r

Yes/No
Questions

Introduction
In this chapter, we begin our treatment of questions in English. English speakers have a
profusion of question types available. Here are some of them.

Question Type Example

1. Yes/no question (sometimes called a Is dinner ready yet?
polar question)
2. Statement-form question (statement You come from Texas?
syntax accompanied by rising
intonation)
3. Negative yes/no question Shouldn’t we send a card?
4. Focused question (with a stressed Was it Nicóle who won the Oscar?
element)
5. Wh-question (which typically uses a What movie is playing downtown?
wh-question word—e.g., who, what,
where—to seek specific information)
6. Negative wh-question Why doesn’t he stop barking?
7. Question tag, negative tag Traffic is heavy at this time of day, isn’t it?
8. Question tag, affirmative tag You didn’t go, did you?
9. Alternative question (also called Would you rather live in the city or the
a choice question; it has a special country?
intonation contour)
10. Rhetorical “question” Haven’t we had enough conflict?
11. Exclamatory “question” Are you kidding!
12. Indirect question I wonder if we should start.

Of course, it is questionable to call all of these questions in the interrogative mood sense
of asking someone something. Certainly, there are questions that don’t seek information,
and there are statements that do (de Ruiter, 2012). To prove this point and to deal with this
assortment of question types, we will spread our coverage over three chapters. The first four
types will be dealt with in this chapter; types 5 and 6 will be covered in Chapter 13; types
7–11 will be handled in Chapter 14; and type 12 will not be discussed much until Chapter 33,
when we take up other forms of indirect or reported speech. We begin with question type 1.
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 Many of the world’s languages form yes/no questions simply by adding rising intonation
to declarative statements. English speakers do this, too (see type 2), but the unmarked form of
an English yes/no question, like (1), requires rising intonation and a different word order from
a statement—one that inverts the subject and the operator. Only a few languages other than
English use a word order different from that of statements in making questions—German,
for example; on the whole, most languages do not do so. Instead, as Ultan (1978) reports in
a typological study of 79 languages from various language families, most languages simply
use a distinctive intonation pattern for questions. The second most popular option among
the languages Ultan studied was the addition of a special interrogative particle to either the
beginning or end of the question or attached directly to a word that is being queried. Here is
a Chinese example from Zhu and Wu (2011, p. 634):
ta shangxue 1 ma
He go school 1 question particle
‘Does/did he go to school?’
At an early stage in the history of English, questions were made with the use of rising
intonation alone. Only much later did inversion come about in question formation. The
earliest form of this inversion was with the subject and the main verb:
Know you the way to Ipswich?
It took much longer for the rule requiring subject and operator inversion to become standard.
Todeva (1991) has pointed out the parallelism between the evolution of the English
language and the acquisition of English as either a first or second language: learners of English
are known to first use rising intonation; only after several more stages do they master inversion.
The following is a somewhat modified developmental pattern for untutored learners that we have
adapted from Pienemann, Johnston, and Brindley (1988) (as reported in Ortega, 2009, p. 35):

Stage Example
I: Fragments 1 rising intonation A hat?
II: Statements 1 rising intonation You are tired?
III: Place question marker in front of Is your daughter work here?
statement
IV: Be inversion Are you listening me?
V: Do support Do you like ice cream?
VI: Other question types Don’t you see?
I wonder why they left.

Of course, as with all second language (L2) data, these stages are not discrete, and within
each there is certainly individual variation. Also, from early on, learners make considerable
use of formulaic questions, such as “How are you?” Nonetheless, it can generally be said
that inversion is the initial learning challenge for learners, and its mastery takes a while. The
challenge is no doubt made more difficult by the fact that English speakers frequently do not
use inverted questions in conversations; hence, the exemplars to which ESL/EFL learners are
exposed are inconsistent with regard to inversion. We return to this point later in this chapter.
As different as English question formation is from Chinese, Zhu and Wu (2011) observe
that it is not necessarily the structural differences that cause learners difficulty. What is
problematic is the assumption that learners already know how questions function. For instance,
an apparently straightforward teacher question—Any questions?—can be multifunctional
(Waring, 2012). Even more dubious is the assumption that learners know how to respond

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 to questions. Replying is not as straightforward as it may seem. This is a problem, given
that it is well known that early interactions between learners and speakers of English are
replete with questions directed to the learners for the purpose of comprehension checks and
clarification requests, and these questions are adjusted to enhance learners’ comprehension,
which sometimes results in ungrammatical input (Long, 1981).
In this chapter, we begin by examining the inversion rule in English under the heading
of form. Other comments about form are directed to the intonation pattern of yes/no questions
and to the structure of short answers. In order to help teachers guide students on how to
respond to questions, we also comment on the meaning of yes/no questions and their variations.
In the section on use, we make some observations about short answers to yes/no questions. We
also discuss contraction in negative questions and the use of elliptical questions, questions
that take less than full form. We conclude this chapter by pointing out other functions that
yes/no questions can fulfill, not only in informal language use, but also in academic language.

The Form of Yes/No Questions

Yes/no questions are often defined as questions for which either “Yes” or “No” is the expected
answer:1
Yes (I am).
Are you going to the party?
No (I’m not).
Inverting the subject and operator gives rise to the characteristic syntactic form of
yes/no questions in English

SUBJECT-OPERATOR INVERSION
With an Auxiliary Verb
Consider the following questions:
1. Will they be in Reno on Friday?
2. Was she able to finish in time?
3. Has Maricor gone home?
4. Are you doing anything tomorrow?
Here is the tree for the first sentence:
S
sm S

Q SUBJ PRED

NP AUX VP ADVL

pro M cop PrepP PrepP

they will be prep NP prep NP

in N on N

Reno Friday

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 The Q marker is treated as a sentence marker because its scope applies to the whole
sentence. Subject-operator inversion inverts the subject with the auxiliary verb will:
S
sm S

Q SUBJ PRED

will NP AUX VP ADVL

pro M cop PrepP PrepP

they 0 be prep NP prep NP

in N on N
subject–operator
inversion Reno Friday
Notice that if this sentence had two auxiliary verbs—for example, if we were to add be 1 ing
to the will in question (1)—the operator is only the first auxiliary verb in the auxiliary string
Will they be gambling in Reno on Friday?
that is inverted with the subject. Furthermore, when the auxiliary has more than one element,
as it does with the phrasal modal in question (2), it is only the first of the elements in the
first auxiliary verb (again the operator) which, along with the tense marker (if there is one) is
inverted with the subject. Here are the trees for question (2) as an illustration of this last point:
S
sm S

Q SUBJ PRED

NP AUX VP ADVL

pro T pm V PrepP

she -past be able to finish prep NP

in N

time
S
sm S

Q SUBJ PRED

-past be NP AUX VP ADVL

pro T pm V PrepP

she 0 0 able to finish prep NP

in N
subject–operator
inversion time
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 With the Be Copula
As you saw in the previous chapter on negation, the negative particle not (a sentential adverb)
is placed after the first auxiliary verb. In this chapter, we see that it is also the first auxiliary
verb that is involved in question formation. Similarly, just as the not follows the be copula verb
when no auxiliary verb is present in negative sentences, so does the be copula verb serve as the
inverted operator when no auxiliary verb is present in yes/no question formation:
Pamela was a new student at the time.
Was Pamela a new student at the time?
S
sm S

Q SUBJ PRED

NP AUX VP ADVL

N T cop NP PrepP

Pamela -past be det AP N prep NP

a ADJ student at det N

new the time

S
sm S

Q SUBJ PRED

-past be NP AUX VP ADVL

N T cop NP PrepP

Pamela 0 0 det AP N prep NP

 a ADJ student at det N

subject–operator
inversion new the time

With Other Verbs

When a sentence has no auxiliary or be verb, a different condition occurs. Notice that we
cannot simply invert the subject and the verb, as we did with the be verb, to form a grammatical
question:
Arlene plays the organ on Sunday.
*Plays Arlene the organ on Sunday?
Although, as we have already noted, such forms were acceptable in historically earlier forms
of English, and their equivalents are grammatical in certain languages today (such as German
and the Scandinavian languages), the main verb in the sentence is not inverted with the
subject in Modern English. 2

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 Once again, we can point to the parallelism between negation and yes/no question
formation. Recall that to make a sentence negative when it has no auxiliary verb or be copula,
the operator do is inserted. Likewise, in yes/no question formation, do is added to function as
an operator when there is no auxiliary verb or be copula verb to invert with the subject:
S
sm S

Q SUBJ PRED

NP AUX VP ADVL

N T V NP PrepP

Arlene -pres play det N prep NP

the organ on N

Sunday
S
sm S

Q SUBJ PRED

NP AUX VP ADVL

N T V NP PrepP

Arlene -pres do play det N prep NP

do-support the organ on N

Sunday
S
sm S

Q SUBJ PRED

-pres do NP AUX VP ADVL

N T V NP PrepP

Arlene 0 0 play det N prep NP

the organ on N
subject–operator
inversion Sunday

Do support is also needed for a few phrasal modals:

used to: Did you use to go skiing when you lived in Vermont?
have to: Does Brent have to work on weekends?

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 In most cases, however, the first element in phrasal modals is the operator, which inverts
with the subject when subject-operator inversion is applied:
be to: Are you to report tomorrow?
In sum, whether or not you use explicit terminology with your ESL/EFL students, they
need to understand that in a yes/no question, the first auxiliary verb in the sentence should
appear before the subject. If there is no auxiliary verb, the be copula should be used before the
subject. If there is no auxiliary verb or be copula, then do must be introduced at the beginning
of the question and must mark the tense of the question.

INTONATION IN YES/NO QUESTIONS

In addition to inverted word order and sometimes the addition of the do operator, English
also uses intonation to mark yes/no questions. Yes/no questions typically display a raised,
nonterminal intonation.3 To understand how this is articulated, consider that statement
intonation in English usually rises on the last stressed syllable of the last content word and
then falls on that word in the sentence. For example:
2  3  1
Mike is learning to use a computer.

Unmarked yes/no question intonation typically rises through the same stressed syllable
and then stays high, what is called a “low rise contour” (Hedberg, Sosa, & Görgülü, to appear):

2 3 3
Is Mike learning to use a computer?

We must quickly qualify this analysis, however. Couper-Kuhlen (2012) convincingly argues
that the intonation of questions depends on the local interaction and the nature of the
communicative activity. For instance, in her data from radio broadcasts, a higher proportion
of yes/no questions with rising intonation is used when conversational topics are being
introduced. Later, as the topics are being elaborated upon, more questions with falling
intonation are used, although they are still the minority. An additional factor is the epistemic
stance reflected in the question. For instance, if the questioner expects a positive response,
then he or she may well use a falling intonation rather than a rising one. All of this indicates
(as we stated in Chapter 1) that as with all decontextualized rules, they may well be useful as
“rules of thumb,” but they may not hold up in dynamic interactions.

SHORT ANSWERS TO YES/NO QUESTIONS

It is unlikely that the response to a yes/no question will be in the form of a full sentence:
Is Ramón an engineering student?

Yes. He is an engineering student.

 He’s
No. He isn’t an engineering student.
Although these answers are possible, such complete replies may give the listener
the impression that the speaker is annoyed by the question. ESL/EFL teachers should be
aware of the possible negativity expressed by a full-sentence answer to a yes/no question
and not always insist on their students answering questions with full sentences, as teachers

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 sometimes do. A more common form of answer, although this too is restricted in its
distribution (as you will see in the section on use later in this chapter), is the short answer:
Yes, he is.
Is Ramón an engineering student?
No, he isn’t.
If the yes/no question begins with the copula be, as in our example sentence, the short
answer is formed with the same form of the be verb that appears in the question. Notice that
be cannot be contracted in an affirmative short answer. All affirmative short answers must be
followed by at least one other word, or else the full form of be must be used:
*Yes, he’s.
Yes, he’s studying electrical engineering.
Yes, he is.
When the yes/no question contains an auxiliary verb, that operator is used in the short
answer.
Yes, she can.
With a modal Can she go?
No, she can’t.
Yes, she is.
With a phrasal modal Is she able to go?
(the first element) No, she isn’t.

With perfect aspect Has she gone? Yes, she has.

No, she hasn’t.
Yes, she is.
With progressive aspect Is she going?
No, she isn’t.
If the sentence contains more than one auxiliary verb, the short answer may also contain
an auxiliary verb in addition to the operator, although when the second or third auxiliary verb
is some form of be, the speaker usually omits it; for example,
Yes, she will have.
With modal and perfect Will she have gone?
No, she won’t have.
(often pronounced with the “have” reduced to /әv/)
With modal, perfect, Will she have been worrying? Yes, she will have (been).
and progressive  No, she won’t have (been).
If do is the operator in the question, it is also used in the short answer with the same
tense used in the question:
Yes, she does.
Does she go there often?
No, she doesn’t.

The Meaning of Yes/No Questions

Although not all linguists agree (cf. Bolinger, 1978), most feel that an acceptable paraphrase of
a yes/no question might be Is it the case that…?, in which the speaker is asking for confirmation
or denial of a proposition. Such an analysis implies that yes/no questions are neutral questions—
that is, there is no expectation regarding whether an affirmative or negative reply is likely.
Chalker (1984), for example, calls them “open questions” because the speaker has an open
mind about the answer. However, there are morphosyntactic and/or phonological variations
of such open questions, which are influenced by the speaker’s expectations. Such is the case
with negative yes/no questions.

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 NEGATIVE YES/NO QUESTIONS
Negative yes/no questions have a different orientation. In the following contrast,
Is Josh playing soccer this year?
Isn’t Josh playing soccer this year?
the first question is neutral with regard to speaker expectations, but the negative question
signals that the speaker has reason to believe that something he or she had previously thought
was true might not be so. Here, in using the negative question, the speaker is signaling that he
or she expected that Josh would be playing soccer but, because of new evidence, now realizes
that this may not be true. The speaker may be hoping for a positive answer but not really
expecting one. Because the prior expectation tends to be aligned with the speaker’s wishes,
Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik (1985) add that negative questions can express
disappointment or annoyance because the speaker’s earlier wishes or expectations now seem
not to be true any longer:
Aren’t we going to the movies? (I thought we had planned to.)
Didn’t you say that the test would be next week? (I thought that was what you had announced.)
Heritage’s (2002) study of news interviews finds that interviewers’ negative questions
are posed “under the auspices of an ideology of ‘neutrality,’” (p. 1430), but in reality allow for
the interviewer to project an expected answer. Here is an example, adapted from Heritage,
from a presidential press conference on March 7, 1997, which took place between President
Bill Clinton and reporter Helen Thomas of UPI (2002, p. 1432):
Thomas: Mister President, in your zeal for funds during the last campaign, didn’t you
put the Vice President and Maggie and all the others in your administration
top side in a very vulnerable position,
Clinton: I disagree with that. How are we vulnerable because...
President Clinton voices disagreement with Thomas’s question, indicating that he
interprets it not as a request for information so much as an assertion, which he rejects.
Admittedly, press conferences tend to be more confrontational than ordinary interactions,
but Heritage (2002) notes that in his data, such responses are recurrent in both British and
American English.
While not all negative questions are posed in an aggressive manner, responding to them
can create semantic problems for many ESL/EFL learners (Bevington, 1979). For example,
native speakers of most Asian and West African languages react to a negative yes/no question
in a literal manner in their own language—they agree or disagree with its form:
Yes (we have no bananas).
Don’t you have bananas?
No (we have bananas).
Speakers of English, on the other hand, react to negative yes/no questions as if they were
affirmative ones; i.e., as if they were disagreeing or agreeing with an implicit assertion:
Yes (we do).
Don’t you have bananas?
No (we don’t).
While negative questions are not all that frequent in normal conversation, the
miscommunication that results from not understanding the underlying expectation may
warrant teaching ESL/EFL students how to reply to them. We should also mention that

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 Koshik (2002) showed that teachers’ questions do not have to be overtly marked as negative
to be interpreted as such. For instance, a teacher’s positive polarity question during a writing
conference with a student can be construed as a negative assertion; e.g., Is this the best way to
start your paper? Presumably, this “reverse polarity assertion” occurs elsewhere as well.

FOCUSED YES/NO QUESTIONS

So far we have been considering yes/no questions where the whole state, activity, or event is
being queried. Sometimes, however, yes/no questions can be more focused. A proposition may
be thought to be true in general, but one of its specific components—subject, verb, object,
adverbial—may be still in doubt. The uncertain element is then queried in a focused way.
Consider, for example, the following questions, where contrastive stress is used to mark the
focused elements (Givón, 1993, pp. 247–248). Unlike unmarked yes/no questions, which are
open with regard to overall expectation, a focused question places an indeterminate element
in the focused position through the use of contrastive stress:
Did Megan play a practical joke on Pat? (or did someone else?)
Did Megan play a practical joke on Pat? (or only plan one?)
Did Megan play a practical joke on Pat? (or did she play something else, such as a trick?)
Did Megan play a practical joke on Pat? (or was it played on someone else?)
When an optional adverbial is present in the question, unless contrastive stress indicates
otherwise, the adverbial automatically attracts and focuses attention in yes/no questions
because of its final position in the clause. Thus, the following focused questions query the
adverbial:
(or was it an accident?)
Did Megan play a trick on Pat deliberately?
(*or did she not do it?)

(or was it on Monday?)

Did Megan play a trick on Pat last Sunday?
(*or did she not do it?)

(or was it somewhere else?)

Did Megan play a trick on Pat at the mall?
(*or did she not do it?)
That the interrogative focus is attracted to optional constituents is further supported by
the fact that when an optional adverbial is present, stressing the optional adverbial is natural.
In contrast, stressing another constituent in the clause is odd:
Did Megan play a trick on Pat deliberately? (or was it an accident?)
?Did Megan play a trick on Pat deliberately? (or did someone else do it deliberately?)

STATEMENT-FORM QUESTIONS
Subject-operator inversion does not always take place. In fact, uninverted statement-form
questions, marked simply with rising intonation, are common (Stivers, 2010). This type
of question is marked in the sense that the speaker who poses the question is anticipating
confirmation:
A: I just got back from San Francisco.
B: You had a good time there? (expecting confirmation)
B’ s reply with accompanying rising question intonation suggests that B’ s hunch was
that the answer would be “Yes.” Had B chosen instead to use the unmarked, neutral, inverted
question, we might assume that B had no expectation about what A’  s reply would be:

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 A: I just got back from San Francisco.
B: Did you have a good time? (uncertain expectation)
In addition, a negative uninverted question could reflect the fact that new information
has just been received that runs counter to an earlier expectation:
(Person A returns home early from a shopping trip)
B: The stores weren’t open late? (counter to earlier expectation)
A’  s early return contradicts B’ s expectation that A would be shopping until later.
Weber (1989) and Williams (1989) both report that uninverted questions are much more
common than one might suppose.4 In her analysis of face-to-face and telephone conversations,
Weber found that as many as 41 percent of all the questions in the data were either uninverted,
of the sort we have just considered, or nonclausal forms, such as the following (Weber, p. 181):
A: I’ve got so much work that I don’t believe it, so I’m just not thinking about that.
B: In school, you mean?
In this nonclausal example, B questions with a prepositional phrase plus the clause
tag you mean. Uninverted forms with rising intonation, with and without tags, serve as
comprehension checks, as we see in this example (Williams, 1990).
In addition to comprehension checks, nonclausal questions often function as “next turn
repair initiators” (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977, p. 367). In conversation analysis, repair
refers to the efforts of participants to deal with trouble in hearing or understanding, and next
turn indicates that the repair occurs in the conversational turn after the “trouble source” turn.
Here is another example from Weber (1989, p. 170):
A: What’s the dark green thing?
B: Pardon?
A: What’s this?
B: That’s Japanese eggplant.
In this example, B’ s production of pardon, a next turn repair initiator, displays some
trouble with hearing or understanding A’  s entire question. A recasts her somewhat modified
question. This time, its meaning is clear, and B responds to the question. Williams (1989)
contributes evidence from her own investigation that full clausal uninverted questions also
function as clarification requests.
One variation of a statement-form question is an echo question, which simply repeats, or
modifies in some minor fashion, a previous utterance with rising intonation. If the intonation
is rising, as it is for unmarked yes/no questions, then the purpose for using the echo question
would simply be to seek confirmation of the preceding speaker’s remark:
A: My sister is going out with Lou.
Your sister is
B: going out with Lou? (seeking confirmation that the previous
She’s 
remark has been understood)

If, on the other hand, the pitch of the intonation rises beyond the usual range, then
the echo question can express counterexpectation—surprise or disbelief (see VanderBrook,
Schlue, & Campbell, 1980, for further discussion):

2 3 4
B: Your sister is going out with Lou?

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 SOME VERSUS ANY
The last point in our discussion of the meaning of yes/no questions has to do with the use
of the determiners some and any, a contrast that we encountered in the previous chapter on
negation. Many ESL/EFL grammar texts say that any is used in questions as well as negatives.
This is true with regard to open or unmarked questions such as:
Do you have any paper I can borrow?
However, we also saw in the chapter on negation that the weakly stressed some suggests a
positive quantity. It is, therefore, used in questions that in some way expect a positive answer,
such as with an offer:
(A waiter to a customer in a restaurant)
A: Would you like some dessert? ( to encourage the answer “Yes”)
Just as we mentioned in our discussion with negatives, we must be cautious, therefore,
about what we say about the distribution of some and any, as they can both occur with different
question types, depending on the meaning5 (partly based on Chalker, 1984, p. 15):
Is there some news? (expecting the answer “Yes”)
Is there any news? (open or neutral question)
Isn’t there some news? (Surely there is.)
Isn’t there any news?
(I had hoped there would be.)
Is there no news?
Many of the issues that we have drawn attention to under the heading of meaning
relate to conducive questions and words that go with them, questions and words that convey a
questioner’s expectation or preference for a given answer. One word of caution is in order
here. When considering conduciveness, we are dealing with a context-based rather than
an absolute notion (Piazza, 2002). As Piazza advises in her study of the pragmatics of such
questions in academic discourse, to some extent the use of conducive questions can be
accounted for by the asymmetrical power balance in classrooms, where it is customary for
instructors to pose questions that have a preferred answer. The fact that we cannot regard
the use of conducive questions as purely a semantic matter leads us to a discussion on the
use of questions.

Issues of Use Concerning

Yes/No Questions
Recall that with use, we are attempting to answer the question: when speakers have two or
more question forms with the same meaning to choose from, which factors influence their
choice—that is, why do they prefer one form over another?

THE USE OF SHORT ANSWERS

Earlier in this chapter, we discussed the form of standard short answers in English (Yes, it
is./No, it isn’t.). While these short-answer forms are worth teaching ESL/EFL students,
one should bear in mind that even these forms do not occur frequently as responses to yes/
no questions. In Richards (1977), replies to yes/no questions containing auxiliary or verb
repetition made up less than 20 percent of the written corpus and less than 10 percent of the

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 spoken English corpus. Similarly, in a discourse analysis of speech samples collected from a
wide variety of contexts, Winn-Bell Olsen (1980) found that standard short forms were used
rather infrequently by English speakers—in fact, only 8 percent of the time—as answers to
yes/no questions in her data (26 out of 329 instances).
Winn-Bell Olsen (1980) discovered that speakers were much more likely to answer
questions with a direct “Yes” (or its colloquial variants—e.g., Yup, Yeah, Uh huh) or a direct
“No” (or its variants—e.g., Nah, Nope, Uh uh, Not yet), each often followed by some sort of
expansion. Indirect affirmations, denials, or hedges (e.g., Does it make you uncomfortable to talk
about this problem? I guess maybe it does.) accounted for a rather large percentage of the answers
as well. Finally, a significant portion of the answers were formulaic sequences of confirmation
or denial (e.g., I doubt it.). Since 23 out of 26 occurrences of standard short-form answers in
her data were found in conversations between strangers or in self-conscious speech, Winn-
Bell Olsen hypothesizes that the more distant the relationship between speakers or the more
uncomfortable the situation, the more frequently speakers tend to use standard short-form
answers.

STATEMENT-FORM YES/NO QUESTIONS

The use of uninverted statement-form yes/no questions might also be said to relate to issues
of social familiarity or distance. Recall that uninverted questions are used when the speaker
expects confirmation. Using an uninverted question thus suggests that the person asking
the question knows the other person well enough to anticipate the other’s answer. Such
intimacy often may not exist, and the use of uninverted questions could then appear to be
presumptuous:
Worker to supervisor: You’re going to the dance?
ESL students have been known to use uninverted questions with their teachers,
You’re giving us a quiz on Thursday?
not realizing that their question can be seen to be presumptuous.

ELLIPTICAL QUESTIONS
At some point, teachers may want to teach their intermediate- and advanced-level students
about informal yes/no questions that occur without an initial operator. Such questions are
fairly frequent in informal conversations between speakers and are different from statement-
form yes/no questions, in that they are used with no expectation or no particular expression
of emotion:
(Are) You going to the movies?
(Has) She been feeling better?
(Do) You know Fred Callahan?
If you is the subject, it can also be deleted in most cases, along with the operator:
(Do you) Wanna study together?
In such questions, the operator and subject are optionally deletable because they are
recoverable from other grammatical and lexical information in the question and from the
discourse context. It would probably not be of high priority for your students to practice
using such elliptical yes/no questions, but they should develop comprehension of this form
and perhaps an ability to automatically supply the missing operator or operator and subject.

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 CONTRACTED VERSUS UNCONTRACTED NEGATIVES IN NEGATIVE QUESTIONS
In English negative yes/no questions, the negative may appear in both contracted and
uncontracted forms. Only the contracted form, however, may appear sentence-initially as
part of an operator:
Isn’t it appropriate to ask?
Is it not appropriate to ask?
The question with the uncontracted negative after the subject is more formal than its
counterpart with a question-initial contracted negative.
In a usage study, Kontra (1981) has documented the occurrence in contemporary
English of uncontracted negative questions such as the following:
Is not linguistics a branch of psychology?
Here, the not appears before the subject in its uncontracted form. While such questions
do occasionally occur, we view this type of question as a stylistically formal and somewhat
archaic vestige of an earlier stage of English. Such a question, Kontra believes, is used when
the speaker is inviting the listener to agree with the speaker’s assumption that the expressed
proposition is self-evidently true. One example he cites is the following excerpt from a
discussion in the British Parliament (Kontra, 1993, p. 340):
Is not it an outrage that the Minister has not even tried to answer the question? . . .
Does not the Minister think that he has a duty to tell people the facts before they vote?
This word order would be unusual in North American English.

THE USE OF AREN’T AS A GAP-FILLER

A final note on contracted negative yes/no questions concerns the lexical gap that occurs in
the first person singular. All of the following are acceptable contracted negative questions and
short answers:
Isn’t he/she/it? He/she/it isn’t.
Aren’t we/you/they? We/you/they aren’t.
However, we cannot contract the verb be and the not in I am not unless we use the
nonstandard I ain’t. What speakers of English do in negative yes/no questions (but not in short
answers) is to substitute are for am and contract. Thus:
I am not.
Aren’t I?
I’m not.
This illogical gap-filler arose because there were strong social and educational stigmas
against the use of ain’t. Aren’t I? is mainly a colloquialism, but it may puzzle ESL/EFL students
when they encounter it; so you should be prepared to explain why sometimes aren’t is used
with the first person singular pronoun in negative yes/no questions.

SOCIAL FUNCTIONS
Up to now, we have been dealing with questions whose function is primarily to seek new
information or to clarify or confirm given or shared information. Yes/no questions can perform
a number of other functions, of course. You have already seen in Chapter 8 how questions
with modal forms can be used in requests for assistance:
Can I get a ride home with you? (direct request)

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 As we also saw in the chapter on modals, the past-tense form of can softens this a bit:
Could I get a ride home with you? (less direct)
An even more polite form of request uses an embedded question (about which we have
more to say in Chapter 33):
I wonder if I could get a ride home with you. (least direct, therefore most polite)
You also saw in Chapter 8 how yes/no question forms could be used in making offers or
invitations:
Would you like to sit for a while?
They can also be used as directives:
Would you please stand up straight?
as reprimands:
Aren’t you a little old to be doing that?
as complaints:
Have you ever stayed home all day with a two-year-old?
and many other functions. Clearly, the function of a yes/no question is going to depend on
the context and the speaker’s intention, but it may also be clear why Heritage (2002) (see
also Raymond, 2003) called questions “a form of social action” (p. 1427). Systemic functional
linguistics, too, views questions as devices for expressing interpersonal meanings (Crawford
Camiciottoli, 2008, p. 1217).

IN WRITTEN ACADEMIC TEXTS

Of course, it is not just in oral discourse that students will encounter questions. According
to Thompson (2001), questions in academic texts assign readers and writers roles. Typically,
the questioner role is assigned to the reader, and the writer takes on the role of the answerer.
Questions are designed to draw readers into a text and to manage the flow of information.
Indeed, based on his corpus study, Hyland (2002) ascribes three functions to questions in
textbooks: “to frame the discourse (signaling the issues to be dealt with), to organize the
text (explicitly introducing new topics and often using metalanguage such as question or
topic), and to set up claims (stimulating thought and anticipating an affirmation)” (Crawford
Camiciottoli, 2008, p. 1218).

Conclusion
As we have indicated, a challenge for beginning ESL/EFL students is to learn about
inversion in yes/no questions—both the syntactic rules and the social conditions in which
they are appropriate. Because the do operator is not a morpheme with many equivalents in
the languages of the world, its use in yes/no questions may require some special attention.
Students may also need some understanding of how to respond to yes/no questions,
particularly negative yes/no questions. Finally, we should remember that not all yes/no
questions are inverted. As you have seen in this chapter, many conversational yes/no questions
are uninverted, elliptical, or nonclausal in form. While you might not specifically teach
ESL/EFL students to produce these forms, students may be confused, and you may need to
help them comprehend their use.

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 Teaching Suggestions
1. Form.  To expose students to yes/no questions before they are asked to form them on their
own, surveys can be used. Surveys in which students learn something about themselves
and their classmates work well. Depending on the ages and backgrounds of your students,
you can use various survey themes: for example, health habits (Do you exercise?), eating
habits (Do you eat rice for breakfast?), or learning strategies (Do you speak English with your
friends?). You can give students a survey form that you have prepared or they can create
one with you. They then complete the survey themselves and ask the questions of one or
more other students.
2. Form. To introduce inversion in sentences containing an auxiliary verb or be, you
can show students a sentence with each word written out on a card. Then substitute a
question-mark card for the period card and move the first auxiliary verb or be verb card
to sentence-initial position.
.
JOHN IS WRITING A LETTER 1
2 ?

.
THE CHILDREN ARE NOISY 1
?
2

Later, in order to introduce students to the formation of yes/no questions without an

auxiliary verb or be, you will need to place a DO card at the front of a sentence after
substituting a question mark card for the period card. For example:
.
2 JOHN ATE THE APPLE 1
DO ?

Next, you can explain to students that the do verb carries the tense for the question. This
can be demonstrated by replacing the DO card with DID and the ATE card with EAT after
substituting the ? for the . Thus:
.
2 DO JOHN ATE THE APPLE 1

3 4

DID EAT ?

Cards could also be used to show that the do carries the tense and person markings with
the simple present tense:
1 JOHN EAT S APPLES .
2 Substitute ? for the period at the end of the sentence and introduce DO to the front.
3 S how that the S of eats gets moved to the initial DO by moving the S from its
position after EATS to a position following DO . Immediately replace DO S with a new
card DOES explaining that rewriting do plus third person singular present as does is a
convention in English.

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  fter several examples have been done, you might have volunteers come up and practice
A
forming questions by moving and substituting the cards. To give students additional
practice, prepare (or have students prepare) pieces of paper with the words, question
marks, and morphemes for pairs of students to manipulate at their desks. These can be
exchanged with other pairs for more practice.
3. Form.  Guessing games can give students good practice in both asking and responding to
meaningful questions.
a. For example, the game “Twenty Questions” provides an engaging way to practice
forming and answering yes/no questions. The rules are simple. Someone thinks of an
animal (including human beings), a vegetable (any living nonanimal), or a mineral
(anything inanimate). The other players then can use up to 20 yes/no questions in
an attempt to guess what the person is thinking of. If they can’t guess after using all
20 questions, the person wins.
A more concrete version for younger learners would be to have someone put
an object in a paper bag, out of sight of the other players. They then get 20 yes/no
questions to guess what is in the bag. For example:
Teacher:   I have put something in this bag. Try to guess what it is, using questions that
can be answered only with a yes or no.
Student 1: Is it round?
Teacher: Yes, it is.
Student 2: Is it hard?
Teacher: No, it isn’t.
Student 3: Is it a ball?
Teacher: No, it isn’t.
Student 4: Can we eat it?
Teacher: No, you can’t.

The person who guesses correctly can be the person to hide the next object. If students
are in the early stages of learning to form yes/no questions, you may want to restrict
the questions to those with modals and the be verb. Also, if they are beginners, they
might need some help from you in accurately forming the questions they want to ask.
b. Another guessing game that encourages the use of yes/no questions is “What’s My
Line?”, in which members of the class select occupations for themselves and the rest
of the class must try to guess the occupation.
c. A similar game is one in which students play “Who Am I?”, where a class member
pretends to be a well-known contemporary or historical figure. The other members of
the class ask yes/no questions to guess the identity of the figure.
4. Form. Each student is given an assignment on a card. The assignment is to find someone
in the class who is characterized by the particular trait written on the card. For example,
one card might say, Find someone who can play the drums. Another might say, Find someone
who is a good cook. Students must ask each other yes/no questions to find at least one person
in the class for whom the trait is true.

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 5. Form. Getting students to ask each other questions about their backgrounds, academic
majors, hobbies, favorite foods, and so on can be useful for practicing questions and
helping students to get to know one another better. One of the techniques of the method
“Suggestopedia” that encourages fluency is to have a student pose a question and then
toss a large inflatable ball to another student. That student catches the ball, answers the
question (if possible with a contraction), poses another question, and tosses the ball to a
third student.
Student 1: Are you from Mexico? (tossing the ball to S2)
Student 2: (catching the ball) No, I’m not. I am from Guatemala.
Student 2: Do you study engineering? (tossing the ball to S3)
Student 3: (catching the ball) Yes, I do.
Student 3: Do you enjoy videogames? (tossing the ball to S4)
Student 4: (catching the ball) No, I don’t.
For students with a low level of proficiency in English, this same activity can be done in
a chain-drill form, in which the same question is asked of and answered by every student
in the room, one by one, thereby creating a chain; for example:
Student 1: Are you from Mexico?
Student 2: No. I’m not. I am from Guatemala.
Student 2: Are you from Vietnam?
Student 3: No, I’m not. I am from Laos.
Student 3: Are you from Morocco?
Student 4: Yes, I am.
Working on questions with third person subjects would also be valuable. You might teach
some formulaic responses at the same time. For example:
Teacher: Is he from Mexico?
Student 1: I don’t know./I think so./I don’t think so.

6. Form. Sometimes reciting verse or poetry can be a pleasant way to practice the

intonation and grammatical form of yes/no questions. Of course, the verse would have
to be something that could be made comprehensible to students. Several of Christina
Rossetti’s poems make repeated use of yes/no questions. They lend themselves to reading
aloud in pairs or groups—one can ask the question, the other can answer it.

7. Meaning. To give students the necessary practice in asking and answering negative
yes/no questions as native speakers of English do (responding to the presupposition, not
the form), you can tell students a short story twice. During the second telling, change a
few of the details. The students’ task is to listen to the story intently and, after you have
told each version once, to use focused negative yes/no questions to ask about details in the
second telling that did not coincide with the first. For instance:
(First story)
Teacher: A man walked out the front door and tripped over his son’s wagon. He scolded
his son and told him to put the wagon in the garage. The boy did this. A while
later, the man went into the garage and tripped over his son’s wagon again.
(Second story)
Teacher: A man walked out the back door and tipped over his son’s bicycle. He scolded
his son and told him to put the bicycle in the shed. The boy did this. A week
later, the man went into the shed and tipped over his son’s bicycle again.

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 Student 1: Wasn’t it the front door?
Teacher: Yes, it was.
Student 2: Wasn’t it a wagon?
Teacher: Yes, it was.
Student 3: Didn’t the father trip over the wagon?
Teacher: Yes. he did.
Student 4: Wasn’t it a day later?
Teacher: No, it wasn’t.
Students will need to make up and tell their own versions of two stories to receive practice
in answering the focused negative yes/no questions of their classmates.

8. Use. To give students practice in using yes/no questions in making polite requests, have
students write down five requests they would like to make. They should each then make
the request of another student in the class. The second student should agree to comply
with the request only if it is in a polite form. For example:
Student 1: Hey, Pablo, can I have some scrap paper?
Student 2: Sorry. No.
Student 1: Pablo, could I borrow some scrap paper, please?
Student 2: Sure. Here’s some.

Exercises
Test your understanding of what has been presented.
1. Provide original example sentences that illustrate the following concepts:
a. unmarked yes/no question g. focused yes/no question
b. negative yes/no question h. standard short-form answer
c. some in a yes/no question i. formulaic short answer
d. uncontracted negative j. yes/no question with phrasal
yes/no question modal and do
e. yes/no question with do k. echo question (showing surprise)
f. statement-form question l. elliptical yes/no question

2. Draw the trees and arrows for the following questions:

a. Was she in class on Friday? c. Will her brother come to the party?
b. Did he write the letter? d. Have you been living in Tampa?

3. What rules have been violated as the following questions were formed?
a. *Do she went? c. *Runs he fast?
b. *Could have he gone? d. *Do they be happy?

4. What do negation and yes/no question formation have in common?

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 Test your ability to apply what you know.
5. An ESL/EFL student has said one of the following. You can understand the meaning
they intend. What guidance could you give concerning the form?
a. *Saw you the movie? c.  *Is not she intelligent?
b. *Did you threw the ball? d.  A: Do you like ice cream? B:  *Yes, I like.

6. We have chosen to place the chapter on negation before this chapter on yes/no
question formation. Some ESL/EFL student materials do not do this. What are some
arguments for teaching them in the order that we do here? Also, brainstorm ways to
get students to ask questions. It is not as easy to do because it is usually teachers who
do the asking.

7. You have a student who never inverts yes/no questions but simply uses an uninverted
question with question intonation. When you tell him that he should invert, he replies
that he often hears native speakers use uninverted questions. What would you say to
this student?

8. An old joke arises from the fact that yes/no questions can serve more than one
function. A wants to know the time and sees that B is wearing a wristwatch.
A: Do you have a watch?
B: Yes. (and keeps on walking)
Explain the misunderstanding.

Bibliography
References
Bevington, G. (1979). On being a negative ESL teacher. TESOL Newsletter, 13(2), 20–22.
Bolinger, D. (1978). Yes/no questions are not alternative questions. In H. Hiz (Ed.), Questions (pp. 87–105).
Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel.
Chalker, S. (1984). Current English grammar. London, England: Macmillan.
Crawford Camiciottoli, B. (2008). Interaction in academic lectures vs. written text materials: The case of
questions. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 1216–1231.
Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2012). Some truths and untruths about final intonation in conversational questions. In
J. P. de Ruiter (Ed.), Questions. Formal, functional, and interactional perspectives (pp. 123–145). Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press.
Cruttenden, A. (1986). Intonation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
de Ruiter, J. P. (Ed.). (2012). Questions: Formal, functional, and interactional perspectives. Cambridge, England:
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PA: John Benjamins.
Hedberg, N., Sosa, J. M., & Görgülü, E. (To appear). The meaning of intonation in yes-no questions in
American English. A corpus study. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.
Heritage, J. (2002). The limits of questioning: Negative interrogatives and hostile question content. Journal
of Pragmatics, 34, 1427–1446.
Heritage, J., & Raymond, G. (2012). Navigating epistemic landscapes: Acquiescence, agency, and resistance
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 Heritage, J., Robinson, J., Elliott, M., Beckett, M., & Wilkes, M. (2007). Reducing patients’ unmet concerns
in primary care: The difference one word can make. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 22, 1429–1433.
Hyland, K. (2002). What do they mean? Questions in academic writing. Text, 22, 529–557.
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LACUS forum 1980 (pp. 412–431). Columbia, SC: Hornbeam Press.
Kontra, M. (1993). Do not people say such things? In V. Becker Makkai (Ed.), The twentieth LACUS forum
1993 (pp. 333–344). Chapel Hill, NC: The Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States.
Koshik, I. (2002). A conversation analytic study of yes/no questions which convey reversed polarity
assertions. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 1851–1877.
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 Suggestions for further reading
For discussion of interrogatives in other languages, see:
Saddock, J. (2012). Formal features of questions. In J. P. de Ruiter (Ed.), Questions: Formal, functional, and
interactional perspectives (pp. 103–123). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
For a discussion of whether subject-auxiliary inversion is purely a form-based rule or is instead motivated by
semantic or pragmatic factors, see:
Borsley, R. D., & Newmeyer, F. (2009). On subject-auxiliary inversion and the notion “purely formal
generalization.” Cognitive Linguistics, 20(1), 135–143
Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press.
Goldberg, A., & Del Giudice, A. (2005). Subject-auxiliary inversion: A natural category. Linguistics Review,
2(4), 411–428.
For a functional classification of questions, see:
Tsui, A. (1992). A functional description of questions. In M. Coulthard (Ed.), Advances in spoken discourse
analysis (pp. 89–110). London, England: Routledge.
For pedagogical activities, see:
Firsten, R. (2008). Grammar connection: Structure through content 2. Boston, MA: Heinle, Cengage Learning.
O’Sullivan, J. K. (2007). Grammar connection: Structure through content 1. Boston, MA: Heinle,
Cengage Learning.
Wisniewska, I., Riggenbach, H., & Samuda, V. (2007). Grammar dimensions: Form, meaning, and use 2
(4th ed.). Boston, MA: Heinle, Cengage Learning.

Endnotes
1. However, there are many other ways to answer a yes/no question. See, for example, Heritage and
Raymond (2012).
2. It can be done, though, in British English with the main verb have, as in Have you the time? and in some
lexicalized sentence stems in American English, such as Have you any idea . . . ?
3. It should be acknowledged that there is no unique question intonation, although some tones may be
more common in questions than others (Cruttenden, 1986, p. 59).
4. Of the 637 questions in Weber’s data, 108 were uninverted forms and 153 were nonclausal forms.
5. We single out some and any as determiners in this section in order to correct a misapprehension about
some being used only in statements and any only in questions. The same point that we are making here
applies also to related forms; e.g., in pronouns (Has anybody/somebody seen the keys?) and in adverbs
(Are you going anywhere/somewhere?). Indeed, Heritage, Robinson, Elliott, Beckett, and Wilkes (2007)
report that patients are more likely to report their health concerns when medical practitioners ask them,
“Is there something else you would like to address in the visit today?” than if something is replaced by
anything.

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