Interrogative mood
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In linguistics and grammar, the interrogative mood is a grammatical mood used for asking questions. Its occurrence is rare. For most languages, there is no special question-asking mood. Many languages employ one of the following syntax methods to change an ordinary sentence (declarative statement) into a question:
- adding a particle to the beginning or end of a sentence. Examples: French adds a particle - n'est-ce pas?; Japanese adds the particle "ka" to polite questions
- inverting the word order in some way; examples: English changes the order of the subject and the first auxiliary verb. "You are sure" becomes "Are you sure?" Also, the indicative statement "You have brown hair" is changed to the question "Do you have brown hair?" by inserting 'do' at the front of the sentence. This type of question formation was becoming quite common in English around the time of Shakespeare (late 1500s). In many Romance languages one must switch the subject and verb to ask a question.
- offering the listener an explicit yes/no choice; example: Mandarin
- using a different intonation; example: English usually ends questions with a rising tone
Languages that use a special mood of the verb to mark questions may also employ one or more of the preceding methods. For example, a language could always use the interrogative mood to ask a question, but it could also offer the listener a choice if a certain answer is desired.
Very few languages have an interrogative mood. An example of one that does is the Nenets language.
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