The article deals with communicative functions of negative yes/no questions, which are compared with their positive counterparts. On the basis of differences in functional sentence perspective, two fundamental types of yes/no questions are distinguished. In the first type, the negative does not express denial, but rather, it modifies the communicative function of the question: it helps to signalize the occurrence of expectation or preference of certain answer by the speaker. In the second type, the negative denies the proposition, the negative/positive form expresses what is expected or doubted to be true.
Financed by the National Centre for Research and Development under grant No. SP/I/1/77065/10 by the strategic scientific research and experimental development program:
SYNAT - “Interdisciplinary System for Interactive Scientific and Scientific-Technical Information”.