Feature 24. Alternative questions
found in question(s): 58
Definition and illustration
Alternative questions are a type of questions that seek for a choice between two or more alternatives. This type of question is sometimes subsumed under the category of polar questions (König & Siemund 2007) but clearly exhibits major differences that warrant a separate treatment (Hölzl 2018).
Languages differ in their marking of alternative questions. The dimension of variation addressed here concerns the presence and absence of question markers as well as of disjunctions. In the latter category, languages sometimes have specialized interrogative disjunctions (e.g., Finnish, Mandarin). Some languages have different disjunctions used interchangeably.
(1) Nepali
hidzo bhai ghər-ma a-jo ki/wa/əthəwa hoʈel-ma bəs-jo?
yesterday y.brother house-loc come-pst.3sg.m.nh or hotel-loc sit-pst.3sg.m.nh
'Did the younger brother come home or stay in a hotel yesterday?'
Other languages use one or more question markers instead of disjunctions, e.g.
(2) South Bolivian Quechua
Aych-ta-chu t'anta-ta-chu ranti-saq?
meat-acc-q bread-acc-q buy-fut.1sg
Should I buy bread or meat?
Some languages combine both markings for the expression of alternative questions. Further marking strategies, such as complex expressions (e.g., 'and if not'), were not addressed in detail in this database.
Correlations
Li (2025) proposes a correlation between basic word order and the marking of alternative questions. In particular, disjunctions are said to be more common in languages of Southern China that exhibit VO word order while languages in Northen Asia that have OV word order prefer the use of a question marker on each of the alternatives (see also Hölzl 2018). Whether this correlation can be extended to languages outside of (East) Asia remains to be investigated.
References
| Author(s) | Title | Year | Published in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Li, Xinyi | A typology of alternative questions in Chinese and other East Asian languages. | 2025 | Language and Linguistics 26(1). 22–77. |
| Hölzl, Andreas | A typology of questions in Northeast Asia and beyond: An ecological perspective (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 20). | 2018 | Berlin: Language Science Press. |
| König, Ekkehard & Peter Siemund | Speech act distinctions in grammar. | 2007 | In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, vol. 1: clause strucure, 276-469. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. |