A functional description of questions 97of question although they have different syntactic structures. They both invite
the addressee to inform the speaker of his choice. To address the second
point, let us compare alternative questions and wh-questions. Look at the
following exchanges initiated by an alternative question and a wh-question.
20 A: How are we going to get there?
B:By.
21 A: Will we get there by or?
B:By.
In both exchanges, A’s utterance invites B to supply a piece of information.
The only difference is that in exchange (21), the information that B supplies
is one of the alternatives offered by A. In other words, both are information-
seeking questions.
Let us now compare alternative questions with yes/no questions. Quirk et
al. differentiate them as follows:
22 Alternative:
A: Shall we go by or?
B:By.
23 Yes/no:
A: Shall we go by bus or?
B: No, let’s take the.
Example (23) is considered to be a different category of question from (22)
because (23) can be responded to by ‘yes’ or ‘no’ whereas (22) cannot. The
answer to (22) must be lexicalized. However, what Quirk et al. have overlooked
is that the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to (23) is only a preface to the stating of
a choice which must also be lexicalized. This is supported by the fact that
a response consisting of only ‘yes’ or ‘no’ without the stated choice is self-
evidently incomplete. Consider:
24 A: Shall we go by bus or?
?B: No.
Hence, like (22), the expected answer to (23) is the stating of a choice. The
only difference between the two is that in the former, the choice is selected
from a restricted set whereas in the latter, it is selected from a potentially
unrestricted set. In this sense, alternative questions and yes/no questions are
similar (see also Jespersen 1933). In fact, in some languages, for example
Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese, which do not have a ‘yes/no’ answering
system, the answer to a yes/no question is always lexicalized as in alternative
questions. For example:
25 (Portuguese)
A: Queres café? (Do you want coffee?)
B: Quero (I want)