Most languages mark yes-no questions with a particle, not by reordering words
English turns a statement into a question by flipping words around, often recruiting do: Sam reads becomes Does Sam read? That makes English unusual. Across the world, the commonest way to flag a yes-or-no question is a small dedicated particle, like Japanese ka, Mandarin ma or Polish czy, added to an otherwise ordinary sentence.
Linguists define questions on three levels. In meaning, a question sets up a range of possible answers. In use, it is a speech act aimed at getting information from someone. In grammar, the interrogative is a clause type with its own rules. Typical questions satisfy all three, but not always: I would like to know your name works as a request for information while being grammatically a statement. Such mismatches are called indirect speech acts, and they run both ways, since asking whether someone could pass the salt is really a polite command.
Questions sort by the answers they allow. Open questions, built with words like who, what and when, permit endless replies, and in English those words usually jump to the front of the sentence, although many languages leave them where the answer would sit. Closed questions offer a limited set: yes-no questions, and alternative questions that present choices. English does not grammatically separate those last two. Do these muffins have butter or margarine? can mean either, and only intonation tells them apart, with the voice rising on butter and falling on margarine for the pick-one reading.
Some questions are not really requests at all. A teacher or quiz host asking for the capital of Australia already knows it, making it a display question. Rhetorical questions expect no reply, and loaded questions are rigged so that any answer concedes something the speaker never meant to admit. Alternative questions carry assumptions too: asking which of three teams someone supports takes for granted that they support one.
Languages mark questions through word order, verb endings, question words and pitch, and most use a characteristic intonation, often rising at the end. A major survey of the world's languages found just a single exception that treats statements and yes-no questions identically: a language called Atatláhuca–San Miguel Mixtec.
Source: Question
