Questions without question markers...

[xuechengfeng]

Maybe I've come across this before and just wasn't paying that much attention, but I thought a question usually had to have some kind of mark that it was a question, such as 吗 or repeating the verb 你会不会说中文？

In my DeFrancis intermediate text, the dialogue is as follows...

王妈，你去做别的事吧。我自己收拾。

您自己收拾？那我做饭去。我把您的屋子又打扫了一次。

My question is the highlighted part. You could obviously tell from the dialogue the inflection in the voice made the sentence a question, but I was, maybe erroneously, always under the impression you needed some kind of marker?

[xiaojiang216]

This is commonly seen when speaking. The "question marker" is not there in terms of a 吗 or repeating the verb, but is put there with one's emphasis on the words. So yes, you are right!

In this case:

您自己收拾？

To me it sounds like the 自己 would have rather strong emphasis put on it to indicate the question.

Hope it helps!

[shibo77]

I thought that you only need to add 吗 or repeat the verb if it is a yes-no question, otherwise simply raise the intonation?

你要吗？Nǐ yào ma? Do you want it?

我要。 Wǒ yào. Yes, I want it.

你要不要？ Nǐ yào bu yào? Do you want it?

我要。 Wǒ yào. Yes, I want it.

Eitherway, the intonation can be changed when spoken and the punctuation marks can be changed when written:

您自己收拾？ Nín zìjǐ shōushi? Are you organising it yourself?

您自己收拾。 Nín zìjǐ shōushì. You are organising it yourself.

您自己收拾！ Nín zìjǐ shōushì! Organise it yourself!

-Shìbó

[Koneko]

This reminds me of a classic example in Chinese punctuation marks.

Have you heard of the following phrase?

下雨天留客天天留我不留

----- Extracted from http://www.gnu.org/software/chinese/otcl/topic-1.en.html ----

A STORY ON WHY TO USE PUNCTUATION MARKS

Chinese the language — at least before Written-in-Vocal-Language Movement 1 (白話文運動) since early years in twentieth centuary — did not use punctuation marks. Together with the basic manner that Chinese words do not have grammatical indicators — such as prefixes, infixes, or postfixes used to indicate that if a word is plural or adjective — make this human language some kind of art, but also introduce some problems as we will see below.

Let us first look at the renowed story: A person went visiting his friend, and stayed for few days because of raining. The host finally became unwelcoming his friend but still tried not to talk about this face-to-face, then he wrote down the words in Chinese, without punctuation marks.

下雨天留客天天留我不留

It's clear that the host had places for his own punctuation "stops" in mind, and these words would be

下雨天 留客天 天留 我不留.

Then the sentence would be

下雨天 "rainy day"

留客天 "time to keep guests"

天留 "the weather/god keeps"

我不留 "I do not keep",

which means "Rainy days are time to keep guests at home. Although the weather/god is willing to keep [you at my place], but I don't."

Of course, the guest knew exactly what his friend — maybe not really a friend — wrote, semantically, but since the host do not put punctuation marks between the words — Chinese don't have any then, the guest put his punctuation "stops" and make the words be separated as

下雨天 "rainy day"

留客天 "time to keep guests"

天留我不 "does weather/god would like to keep me?"

留 "Yes".

These first two are just the same as general Chinese readers would expect, and the last two mean "[Guest asks hirself:] Does weather/god would like to keep me here? Yes."

There is also another way to separate this sentence, that is

下雨 天留客 天天留我不 留

Then the sentence would be changed semantically as

下雨 "it rains"

天留客 "the weather/god would like to keep guests"

天天留我不 "keep me everyday or not?"

留 "keep",

which means "It rains, and it looks like the weather/god would like to keep guests. [Guest asks:] Would you like to keep me everyday? [Host answers:] Yes, I would."

You will find that just a single sentence would possible be denoted as three or more different ones, 2 it's surely a kind of art. This story tells us that if you don't want to keep guests at home, learn to use punctuation marks first .... Therefore we translators must first learn to use punctuation marks carefully — especially Chinese translators whose culture did not have them traditionally.

---

K.