Introduction to interrogatives

An interrogative construction is a grammatical form used to ask a question. There are two kinds of questions: yes/no questions and information questions. So-called yes/no questions may be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

• Are you a student at the University of Texas?
• Have you ever been to Sixth Street or Barton Springs?
• Do you know how many Aggies it takes to screw in a lightbulb?

Information questions contain a specific interrogative word (who, what, when, why, how) and cannot be answered with a yes or no. Their purpose is to elicit a specific piece of information.

• Who is Tex?
• When did he come to Texas?
• How did he learn French?

Besides using ‘est-ce que’, questions in French can be formed by inversion of the subject and verb.

formulating questions
The word ‘do’ is used in English question formation. In similar fashion, French yes / no questions can be formed with the phraseest-ce que.

There are several other ways to ask a question in French. For instance, a tag question is a question word or phrase ‘tagged’ on to the end of a statement which requires a confirmation with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.

Finally, the most common way to ask a question in French conversation is to use rising intonation. In this kind of interrogative construction, the word order is the same as a declarative sentence, but the speaker’s voice rises at the end to signal the question.