Negative yes-no questions

In addition to affirmative yes-no questions. English has negative yes-no questions such as:

Can’t he drive? Isn’t she a student?

Hasn’t the rain stopped yet?

There are semantic problems for many ESL/EFL learners as they encounter negative yes-no
questions in English. For example, native speakers of a Chinese language or a West African language
react to a negative yes-no question literally in their own language. In literal translation. This would be as
follows:

Don’t you have bananas? Yes, (we have no bananas).

No, (we have bananas).

The native speaker of English. on the other hand, reacts to negative yes-no questions as if they were
affirmative ones, with the only difference being one of presupposition, e.g.:

Don’t you have bananas? Yes, (we do).

No, (we don’t).

As an ESL/EFL teacher you should be aware of this fundamental semantic difference and you should find
out whether your students react to negative yes-no questions the English way

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4. Compare “Don’t you have bananas?” with “Do you have bananas?” The former is used when the
speaker thought the hearer would have bananas and then suddenly received information to the
contrary. Whereas the latter is used in situations without any expectations or in situations with positive
expectations.

Or the other way. If they react the other way. Considerable practice will be needed to make the
difference clear and to avoid the possibility of miscommunication.

A less common alternative form. Which is formal but nonetheless acceptable, for the three yes-no
questions cited above would be as follows:

Can he not drive? Is she not a student?

Has the rain not stopped?

In contrast, the following questions are unacceptable in current English:

*Can not he drive? *Is not she a student?

*Has not the rain stopped?

How then can we account for negative yes-no questions? Transformational grammar offers a solution to
the problem of generating only the acceptable negative yes-no questions. By ordering our
transformations properly we can both produce acceptable forms of the negative question and eliminate
any possibility of producing the ungrammatical ones.

Example sentence: Is John not swimming?

NOT

pres BE swim

To produce a negative question in which negative contraction does not occur, the following order
should be followed:

Output of base: NOT Q John pres BE ING swim

NOT placement: Q John pres BE NOT ING swim

Subject/ auxiliary inversion: pres BE John NOT ING swim

Affix attachment (2x): BE + pres John NOT swim + ING

Subject-verb agreement and morphological rules: Is John not swimming?

If we wanted to produce a negative question with a contracted negative from the same basic
structure (i.e., “Isn’t John swimming?”) the following order of transformations would be appropriate:

Output of base: NOT Q John pres BE ING swim

NOT placement: Q John pres BE NOT ING swim

NOT contraction: Q John pres BE + N’T ING swim

Subject/auxiliary inversion: pres BE + NT John ING swim

Affix attachment (2x): BE + N’T + pres John swim + ING

Subject-verb agreement and morphological rules: Isn’t John swimming?

Next. Consider the following negative question:

Doesn’t he live here?

In a question such as this we know that the DO-support transformation must operate. But how is it
ordered with respect to the other transformations?

We have already learned that in a negative statement the NOT placement tranformation must
precede the DO-support transformation because it is the structural change which results from the NOT
placement transformation which provides the motivation for applying the DO-support transformation.
 Thus, the basic structure and first two transformations for the above negative question would look
like this:

Doesn’t he live here?

NOT

Output of base: NOT Q he pres live here

NOT placement: Q he pres NOT live here

DO support: Q he pres DO NOT live here

Moreover, we know the order of negative contraction and subject/auxiliary inversion

transformation with respect to each other. NOT contraction must precede the subject/ auxiliary
inversion transformation in order to produce negative questions with contracted negatives. Thus,

NOT contraction: Q he pres DO + N’T live here

If we consider DO our first lexical auxiliary verb, it gets inverted (along with the tense and the cotracted
affic -N’T) by our subject/auxiliary inversion transformation.

Subject/auxiliary inversion: pres DO + N’T he live here

We finish the derivation by applying the affix attachment transformation and the subject-verb
agreemeny transformation. Respectively:

Affix attachment (I×): DO + N’T + pres he live here

Subject-verb agreement and morphological rules: Doesn’t he live here?

What insight does this analysis give us with regard to the formation of negative yes-no questions in
English?

In English negative questions, the negative may appear in both contracted and uncontracted
forms. Only the contracted form may appear sentence-initially as part of an auciliary verb. However. The
uncontracted NOT will appear internal to the sentence preceding the remainder of the auxiliary or the
VP.

In a usage study that argues against our analysis of negative yes-no questions. Kontra (1981)
documents the occurrence in contemporary English pf uncontracted negative questions such as the
following:
 a. Is not linguistics a branch of psychology?

In our analysis we have ruled out such questions and argue instead that b is the grammatical form:

b. Is linguistics not a branch of psychology?

We view the a type question as a very formal and rather archaic historical vestige, i.e., something
reminiscent of Elizabethan literature or the King James version of the Bible, and thus we strongly feel
that the b version is the preferred contemporary form. Evidence for our position comes from the fact
that the a type question has a limited distribution; the subject of the a type question may never be a
pronoun, whereas the b type question takes pronominal subjects freely:

a. *Is not it a branch of psychology? b. Is it not a branch of psychology?

We do admit, however. That the older form may still occur occasionally in formal English writing-
particularly so. Perhaps, if the author has had heavy exposure to English literature or English versions of
the Bible that were produced two or more centuries ago.

A final note on contracted negative yes-no questions concerns the lexical gap that occurs in the first
person singular. We can say all of the following:

He/she/it isn’t Isn’t he/she/it?

You/they/we aren’t Aren’t you/they/we?

However, we cannot contract the verb BE and NOT in I am not unless we use nonstandard I ain’t. Thus
we also have no grammatically related yes-no question form unless we also use nonstandard ain’t I?
This, of course. Holds true for question tags as well as yes-no questions. What speakers of English often
do in yes-no questions and question tags (but not in statements) is to substitute are for am and
contract. Thus:

I am not Aren’t I?

This illogical gap-filler arose because there were strong social and educational stigmas against the use of
ain’t. Aren’t I is mainly a colloquialism, but it may puzzle your perceptive ESL/EFL students when they
encounter it; so you should be prepared to explain why we sometimes say aren’t I in yes-no questions
and in tag questions.
Some/any variation in yes-no questions

In yes-no questions there is subtle variation between some and any that cannot be explained using the
some/any suppletion rule discussed in the preceding chapter. Consider questions like these:

1. Do you want some coffee? 2. Do you have some scratch paper?

Any any

A polite hostess making an offer for the first time would undoubtedly use some in her version of the first
question. The same question with any is more informal, less directed, and may also be anticipating(or
encouraging) a negative response- e.g.:

“ I’m getting myself some coffee Do you want any?”

Does anyone

In the second question.however any would probably occur as often as some. Here the speaker is making
a request rather than an offer, and since scratch paper is a elatively low-value commodity, the speaker
may feel justified in down-playing the request, in making it as casual as possible. The use of some in the
second question could indicate that the speaker feels a sense of urgency or importance about obtaining
the scratch paper.