Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

Turkish: A comprehensive grammar 254
(13) Tiyatroya gitmeden önce yer ayırtmak lazım deĞİL mi?
necessary not INT
‘Isn’t it necessary to reserve seats before going to the theatre?’
A sentence containing a tag question has two intonational phrases, sometimes separated
by a pause before değil. The first intonational phrase has a slight rise followed by a fall
(the pattern for statements), and the second one, consisting just of the tag question, has a
high rise followed by a fall:
(14) Tiyatroya gitmeden önce yer ayırtMAK lazım, deĞİL mi?
necessary not INT
‘It’s necessary to reserve seats before going to the theatre, isn’t it?’
In the written language the ambiguity is resolved by using a comma before a tag question.
öyle and değil mi can be used together as a reinforced form of değil mi (i.e. öyle değil
mi). These questions are only minimally different from tag questions with değil mi.
19.1.2 ALTERNATIVE QUESTIONS
These are questions which present two (or more) alternatives, equivalent to questions
with ‘or’ in English. The particle mI is placed after each of the alternatives presented,
which can optionally be connected by yoksa ‘or’ (28.3.3.1). The types of phrases mI can
attach to are described in 19.1.3.
Where they are predicates, the second may simply be the negation of the first, as in
(15)–(17):
(15) Cemal okula git-ti mi, (yoksa) git-me-di mi?
go-PF INT (or) go-NEG-PF INT
‘Did Cemal go to school or not?’
(16) Bu hastanede ameliyathane var mı, (yoksa) yok mu?
existent INT (or) non-existent INT
‘Is there an operating theatre in this hospital or not?’
(17) Ankara-ya mı İstanbul-a mı gitmek istiyorsun?
Ankara-DAT INT Istanbul-DAT INT
‘Do you want to go to Ankara or to Istanbul?’
In alternative questions, each alternative has a high rise followed by a fall, sometimes
with a rise in the juncture point between the two alternatives: