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Interrogative form

425b

Prototypical questions have interrogative form:

Do you want one?

Are you nervous?

Would you prefer Spain or Portugal?

What do you want?

Who was looking for me?

Û

292 Interrogative clauses for the structure of interrogative clauses

Many questions do not have interrogative structure, and may be declarative or

imperative in form. Intonation and context indicate that the utterance is to be

heard as a question:

A: So you like the people round there?

B: Oh yes.

A: Tell me what time you’re arriving again?

B: It’ll probably be around six, or six-thirty.

Eliciting a verbal reply

425c

Most questions desire and get a verbal reply from the addressee. However, one

type, the rhetorical question, simply raises a question in the recipient’s mind or is

a question which the asker, not the recipient, answers:

We all know that, statistically, we’ve got more chance of winning the lottery

jackpot than of dying in a plane crash, so 

why is it that the more I fly, the less I

want to? It’s not a question of safety.

716 | Questions 

Cambridge Grammar of English

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Even the National Union of Students, which has vociferously campaigned for

free university education, has now formally recognised that student debt is a

way of life. At its recent conference it voted in favour of backing a system of

loans. 

So who is going to provide those loans in the future?