When the foreign students attend the intensive Mandarin course in China, they will come across some different kinds of interrogative sentences. Today we will talk about tow kinds of interrogative sentences. The two kinds of sentences are the non-interrogative sentence and specific question. Now let’s see them one by one.
The first kind of interrogative sentence is the non-interrogative sentence. The specific sentence is used to consult the answers of a question. The answer is yes or no. the intention of the sentence is to inquire a positive or negative answer to a whole sentence or some certain event. For example, the sentence 明天你去长城吗? Will you go to the Great Wall tomorrow? The answer to the non-interrogative sentence is yes or no. There are no other answers to the question. The query modal particle 吗 will be used in the end of the sentence. The foreign students often omit the particle 吗 due to the negative transfer of the mother tongue.
Another point related to the non-interrogative sentence is that the interrogative sentence with interrogative tone is used to refer to inquiry, which should draw attention from the foreign students who learn Chinese language in China. This kind of interrogative sentence possesses little tone of inquiry. The asker will get the needed information from the above context to generate some speculation which needs the affirmation and proof. Generally speaking, this kind of sentence expresses the surprise and suspect to information in the above context.
The specific question refers to the sentences with the combination of the interrogatives like 谁who, 什么what, 哪儿where, 怎么how, 多少how many. This kind of interrogative sentence is raised to ask the time, place, quality, way and reason of the event. The specific question needs the listener to give specific answers to the questions. The asker has no tendency to any of the questions. For example, the sentence 你明天去机场接谁? Who will you pick up in the airport tomorrow? The question of this kind is called the specific question since it needs the specific answer to the question. The answer is 接我妈妈. It is my mother who I will pick up.
One point which should draw attention is that the words 几,多少 and 多should be combined with noun classifiers, verbal classifiers and adjectives when they are used in the specific questions.