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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Yes-no questions with mI
In English, you form yes-no questions by moving the auxiliary verb to the beginning of a sentence: Adam is a student: Is Adam a student? As mentioned earlier, Turkish does not have auxiliaries to do that. Instead, it forms yes-no questions by addition of a question particle to the sentence. -mI is the yes-no question particle in Turkish. It is written as a separate word and it appears in various positions in a sentence, following some constraints. Despite the fact that it is a separate word orthographically, it undergoes I-type vowel harmony through which its vowel harmonizes with the last vowel of the word it follows. That is why it is treated as a suffix most of the time.
There are five things that you need to learn about the question particle:
(a) It undergoes I-type vowel harmony. Here are some examples:
Bu ev mi?
Bursa şehir mi?
Bu araba mı?
Bu sarı mı?
Bu film uzun mu?
Bu şehir Tokyo mu?
Bu adam unlu mu?
[...]
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