for humanities sciences al qadisiya

Abstract

AbstractThe present paper is an attempt to explore alternative questions in English and Arabic. In English, an alternative question is a type of questions in which the questioner offers the listener unbiased choices linked by the explicit disjunctive morpheme 'or' and the answer is expected to be identified with one of these choices. On the other hand, in Arabic, an alternative question which invites the listener to select from a predetermined set of answers by the questioner is formed by the use of the interrogative 'hemza' of perception followed by the connected and coordinated particle 'am' only.This paper falls into three sections. The first section deals with alternative questions in English in terms of scope, types and functions. Following the same way, the second section is concerned with alternative questions in Arabic. The last section concentrates on the similarities and differences in both languages: English and Arabic . Finally, the conclusions sum up the findings of the study.