Yes–no question

In linguistics, a yes–no question, also known as a binary question, a polar question, or a general question, is a question whose expected answer is one of two choices, one that provides an affirmative answer to the question versus one that provides a negative answer to the question. Typically, in English, the choices are either "yes" or "no". Yes–no questions present an exclusive disjunction, namely a pair of alternatives of which only one is a felicitous answer. In English, such questions can be formed in both positive and negative forms positive yes/no question: "Will you be here tomorrow?" negative yes/no question: "Won't you be here tomorrow?" Yes–no questions are in contrast with non-polar wh-questions. The latter are also called content questions, and are formed with the five Ws plus an H ( "who", "what", "where", "when", "why", "how"). Rather than restricting the range of possible answers to two alternatives, content questions are compatible with a broad range of alternative answers. For example, questions beginning with "who", involve a set of several alternatives, from which one is to be drawn; in this respect, they are open-ended questions. In contrast, yes–no questions are closed-ended questions, as they only permit one of two answers, namely "yes" or "no". Interrogative Yes–no questions take many forms cross-linguistically. Many languages mark them with word order or verb morphology. Others use question particles or question intonation. These strategies are often mixed and matched from language to language. In Esperanto, the word "ĉu" added to the beginning of a statement makes it a polar question. In Germanic languages, yes–no questions are marked by word order. The following Dutch example shows how questions can be formed using subject inversion. In Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani), yes–no questions have rising intonation on the verbal complex, whereas declaratives generally have falling intonation. Unlike English, they do not involve inversion of the finite verb.