How questions are handled also differs from language to language, but there are some fundamental similarities. There is a basic distinction between questions to which a yes-or-no-answer can be given and questions that include interrogative pronouns, such as ‘who?’ and ‘what?’, or interrogative adverbs, like ‘where?’ and ‘why?’. I treat them in that order.
In Navajo, a yes-or-no question is preceded by da’. There is no other change in the sentence:
Da’ dichin ni’niiłhį́? ‘Are you hungry?’
Such questions can be answered with ’aoo’ ‘yes’ or dooda ‘no’.
The Biblical Hebrew particle ha-, prefixed to the first word in the sentence (either the verb or another constituent that has been moved to the beginning to be questioned), is exactly similar:
Haṯimšōl bānū? ‘Are you going to rule over us?’
The answer repeats the questioned word.
Mandarin likewise has a particle ma that marks yes-or-no questions. It appears at the end of the clause, and there is no other change:
Nǐ huì shuō Pǔtōnghuà ma? 你会说普通话吗? ‘Are you able to speak Mandarin?’
The question is usually answered by repeating the (first) verb:
Bú huì. 不会. ‘I can’t.’
If the question is about a state, it is more idiomatic to answer with shì de ‘yes’ or bú shì ‘no’ (literally ‘it isn’t’):
Nǐ gǎnmào le ma? — Shì de. 你感冒了吗? — 是的.
‘Have you got a cold?’ — ‘Yes.’
It is also common to pose a question by stating the alternatives:
Tā míngtiān lái bù lái? 她明天来不来? ‘Is she coming tomorrow?’
(she tomorrow come [or] not come, p. 106)
In that case too the answer simply repeats the verb (positive or negative).
The Latin system is also fairly simple. The question particle is –ne. It is attached to the word being questioned (the verb, if no specific word is questioned), and that word tends to be placed at the beginning of the sentence, e.g.:
Omnisne pecūnia dissolūta est? ‘Has all the money been spent?’
If the speaker expects an affirmative answer, nōnne is instead placed at the beginning of the sentence; if a negative answer, num is used. If no question particle is used, the question is emphatic and emotional:
Īnfēlīx est Fabricius quod rūs suum fodit?! ‘Fabricius is unhappy because he digs his own land?!’
A Latin question can be answered by repeating the verb, or the questioned word, but there are also words for ‘yes’ and ‘no’, as in English.
Like Mandarin, Latin has a construction for posing alternative questions, but it is used much less often:
Vōsne Lūcium Domitium an vōs Domitius dēseruit? ‘Have you (pl.) deserted Lucius Domitius, or has Domitius deserted you?’
There are minor variations on the latter construction: see Gildersleeve and Lodge Reference Gildersleeve and Lodge1895: 293–94, from which the above quotation is taken.
Unlike its ancestor, Spanish has no particle to mark yes-and-no questions. Instead the subject is usually placed after the verb:Footnote 1
¿Ha llamado mi hermano? ‘Has my brother called?’
Notice that the subject is placed after the entire verb phrase, not just after the auxiliary. It can even be placed after the direct object:
¿Ha traído Miguel flores? / ¿Ha traído flores Miguel? ‘Has Michael brought flowers?’
If either the subject or the direct object is significantly longer, the longer item is placed last:
¿Ha traído flores el vecino de tu suegra? ‘Has your mother-in-law’s neighbor brought flowers?’
¿Ha traído Miguel las flores que encargamos? ‘Has Michael brought the flowers that we ordered?’
As in Latin, it is also possible to ask a question with no overt marking except intonation, e.g.:
¿Usted quiere venir conmigo? ‘You want to come with me?’
But such questions don’t seem to be particularly emphatic. Like English, Spanish has answer words for ‘yes’ (sí) and ‘no’ (no).
Like Spanish, English postposes the subject in yes-and-no questions, but it is placed immediately after the first auxiliary:
Is she coming tomorrow?
Has my brother called?
Will you be completely healed in a couple of weeks?
The same peculiarity that we encountered in the discussion of negatives reappears in questions: if there is no auxiliary, do must be inserted. Otherwise the usual rules are followed:
Does she know this person?
If the negative has been contracted with the auxiliary, the subject follows the whole contracted sequence:
Don’t the legislators understand that rail transit is underfunded?
In fact, negative contraction is normal in these instances, at least in colloquial English. You can say
Do the legislators not understand …
but the effect is somewhat more emphatic.
The most basic interrogative words are usually the interrogative pronouns. Because the distinction between people and just about everything else is so fundamental in human societies, it is common for languages to have a pronoun meaning ‘who?’ and another meaning ‘what?’. That is exactly the situation in Biblical Hebrew:
Mī ’attā ūmā ze? ‘Who are you and what is this?’
In the Hebrew examples that I have seen, the interrogative pronoun is usually placed first in the sentence, as in English. For instance, at the beginning of Psalm 27:
| YHWH | ’ōrī | wəyiš‘ī; | mimmī | ’īrā? |
| ‘The Lord (is) my light and my salvation; of whom should I be afraid?’ | ||||
the interrogative is placed first in the second clause even though it is the object of a preposition (literally ‘from’), and the preposition is therefore fronted with it, exactly as in Latin or formal English.
Although Navajo uses a large number of interrogative words (Young and Morgan Reference Young and Morgan1980, grammar pp. 67–72), and their syntax is not clearly explained in the literature, it is at least clear that there is a word meaning ‘who?’ as opposed to other interrogatives:
Háílá shilééchąą’í yik’élwod? ‘Who found my dog?’
Díí ha’át’íí’ át’é? ‘What is this?’
Haalá / daalá yinílyé? ‘What is your name?’ (or, ‘How are you named?’)
As the second example shows, interrogatives are not necessarily fronted in Navajo.
Mandarin makes the same distinction between ‘who?’ and ‘what?’, but note the word order of the following sentences:
Tāmende lǎoshī shì shéi? 他们的老帅是谁? ‘Who is their teacher?’
Nǐ zhǎo shénme? 你找什么? ‘What are you looking for?’
In English the interrogative pronoun is usually first, whether it is the subject of the clause (as in the first example) or not (as in the second). In Mandarin the interrogative pronoun occupies whatever position the corresponding noun phrase will occupy in the answer. In the first case the answer would be something like
Tāmende lǎoshī shì Lǐ xiānshēng. 他们的老帅是李先生. ‘Their teacher is Mr. Lee.’
so the interrogative pronoun is last in the clause; you can see that the reasoning in the second example is the same, since direct objects follow their verbs in Mandarin (see Lesson 6). The interrogative pronoun is first only if it corresponds to the subject in the answer, e.g.
Shéi náqù le wǒde bĭ? 谁拿去了我的笔? ‘Who took my pen?’
There are other languages that shift the interrogative pronoun to the beginning of the sentence, and other languages that do not.
Most of the other interrogative expressions in Mandarin include shénme; for instance, ‘when?’ is shénme shíhou 什么时候 (literally ‘what time?’), and ‘why?’ is wèi shénme 为什么 (literally ‘what for?’). But ‘where?’ is usually nǎr, and ‘which?’ is nǎ, which must be followed by a classifier:
Qǐngwèn, cèsuǒ zài nǎr? 请問, 厕所在哪儿? ‘Please, where is the rest room?’
Nǐ xǐhuan nǎ běn shū? 你喜欢哪本书. ‘Which book do you like?’
As you might expect, possession by an interrogative pronoun is expressed straightforwardly in Mandarin:
Zhèi zhī qiānbĭ shì shéide? 这枝铅笔是谁的? ‘Whose pencil is this?’
You might expect that each language handles possession by interrogatives like possession by other pronouns, and many do. However, both Hebrew and Navajo treat interrogative pronouns like nouns in expressing possession. Thus in Hebrew we find the construct state followed by ‘who?’, as if the latter were a noun, e.g. in Genesis 24.23:
| Baṯ-mī | ’att? | ‘Whose daughter are you?’ |
| (daughter-who (are) you (fem.)) | ||
In Navajo háí is used with the 3rd-person possessive bi-, just as if it were a noun:
| Dííshą’ | háí | bichidí? | ‘Whose car is this?’ |
| (this | who | his-car) |
Latin interrogative pronouns might be expected to have a full set of forms for gender, number, and case, like the 3rd-person pronoun. But although neuter quid is distinguished from non-neuter quis (in the nominative and accusative), masculine and feminine are not distinguished for ‘who?’, and there are no plural forms – so that the system resembles that of Mandarin much more than might be expected. That makes sense in real-world terms, since the gender and number of what is being asked about are typically not known. Possession is simply expressed by the genitive, as for other nominals. ‘Which’, which is an adjective, does have a full set of forms, as expected. Latin also has an extensive set of interrogative adjectives and adverbs: quot ‘how many?’, quandō ‘when?’, ubi ‘where’, cūr ‘why?’, etc. The interrogative word typically appears first in the sentence, but otherwise there is no change in word order.
The Spanish system resembles the Latin system from which it is descended, but there are a couple of differences. As in Latin, the interrogative word usually appears first; but the verb usually follows, and the subject follows the verb unless it is the interrogative word:
¿Cómo se llama su amigo? ‘What’s your friend’s name?’
(how himself calls your friend)
¿Cuándo pagará el reya sus sirvientes? ‘When will the king pay his servants?’
¿Quién sabe la verdad? ‘Who knows the truth?’
(The interrogative is the subject in the last sentence.) If there is a direct object and it is shorter than the subject, even the direct object precedes the subject, just as in yes-or-no questions:
¿Dónde compran pan los campesinos del pueblo? ‘Where do the people of the village buy bread?’
Another complication is the use of cuál. In principle cuál means ‘which one?’, but it is used when other languages use what or its equivalent if a choice is even remotely possible, e.g.:
¿Cuál es la diferencia? ‘What’s the difference?’
The default word for ‘what’, qué, is used in asking general questions or questions about the nature of something, e.g.:
¿Qué hora es? ‘What time is it?’
¿Qué es la vida humana? ‘What is human life?’
Strangely enough, qué is used as an adjective meaning ‘which’ before a noun in many dialects of Spanish, e.g.:
¿Qué diputados están presentes? ‘Which members of parliament are present?’
On the other hand, ‘who’ is always quién, and ‘whose’ is simply de quién, literally ‘of whom’:
¿De quién es esa tienda? ‘Whose shop is this?’
(The inherited word for ‘whose’, cuyo, is now archaic and literary.)
Like Spanish, English places the subject after the verb in this kind of question unless the interrogative word is the subject, but of course only after the first auxiliary, as in yes-and-no questions:
Who knows the truth? (who is subject)
When will you be coming back?
If there is no auxiliary, the do-support rule applies:
Why did you run away?
Unlike Spanish, English has retained a bit of case-marking on its interrogative pronouns: whom is the objective form of who, and there is a possessive adjective whose. However, the objective caseform is being lost. Although in formal English one says
Whom did you see?
because whom is the direct object of see, in colloquial English
Who did you see?
is now much more normal. But so far the loss is limited. If you move an interrogative out of a prepositional phrase, stranding the preposition, it’s normal to drop the objective form:
Who did you give it to?
But if you move the preposition with it, the objective form is retained:
To whom did you give it? / *To who did you give it?
Of course that might be connected with the fact that fronting the preposition with its interrogative object is a somewhat more formal construction.
This last point brings up a further peculiarity of English, namely preposition stranding. There is nothing like it in Latin or Spanish (or Italian, or French, or German, or Hebrew … ). In most languages that front interrogatives you must front the preposition with its interrogative object, e.g.:
¿A quién lo dio usted? ‘To whom did you give it?’ / ‘Who did you give it to?’
Quā dē causā hoc fēcistī? ‘For what reason did you do this?’ / ‘What did you do this for?’
Some teachers condemn preposition stranding in the belief that it’s “bad grammar,” but in fact the construction is very old: I recall finding an example in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a famous narrative poem written around 1400. It’s good, traditional native English; it just happens to be different from Latin, for example. (On the concept of “bad grammar,” see the Epilogue.)
