Telling a question apart from a statement

[ZhongwenBen]

Hey all,

 

I've been studying Chinese on and off for two years now, and lately I've been trying to buckle down a bit more so I've joined the forum! 

 

 

My question is in regards to this sentence I read earlier today: 

 

 

你错过公共汽车了？

 

I get that the question is "Did you miss the bus?", but my question is this:  If I were speaking to another person with no written conversation (and thus no question mark), how is this question different from saying "You missed the bus."? I thought that this question like this would need a 吗 at the end to signify its nature as a yes/no question, so If anyone could clarify why that isn't necessary that would be awesome. 

 

Thanks,

 

Ben

 

 

 

 

[陳德聰]

Similar to the way you can tell the difference between "You missed the bus." and "You missed the bus?"

 

The 了 can do funny things with the right pitch intervals.

[ZhongwenBen]

So a question would require the 了 to be pronounced at a higher pitch, but a statement wouldn't - just like in english?

[陳德聰]

Someone else might be able to give a more precise answer, but as far as I can tell, I would say that the question version ends relatively higher than the statement version. But in general I think the overall tone of the sentence will be more obviously different in each case.

 

But in English you can kiiiind of ask a question without raising your voice at the end as well, in which case context and interpretation of the discourse is probably all you have to go on.

"You'll never believe what happened to me today!"

"You missed the bus."

[歐博思]

I like to think of tone questions like this as "tones on a platform". In addition to the four tones, the whole platform where the tones rest itself can raise or lower. Hope that helps a bit.

[anonymoose]

As mentioned above, the tone contour of the sentence changes, similar to in English. It's quite obvious when it happens actually. I guess you just haven't come across it in real life in Chinese yet.

 

The other thing to bear in mind is that misunderstandings due to ambiguous sentences also happen in Chinese just as they do in other languages.

[ZhongwenBen]

The platform analogy was helpful. I suppose that, though I do think Chinese is less confusing than English, I may have over-estimated its simplicity at times. Thanks for the answers!