Toward a typology of question particles in the languages of China

•The languages of China favor question particles (QPs).•The QPs in the languages of China are mostly sentence-final.•Contrary to the WALS coding, 12 languages employ polar QPs.•QPs are often used in wh-questions in the languages of China.

Having surveyed 138 languages spoken in China, this paper attempts to provide a unified account of question particles from a typological perspective. Based on the characteristic structural features of individual interrogatives in these languages, we particularly take issue with Dryer (2013a,b) on two points: (i) some languages he labeled as “no question particles” in fact employ question particles in forming polar interrogatives; (ii) the positions of question particles in the languages of China are different from his findings in that most languages of China prefer sentence-final positions, whereas Dryer reports a much smaller proportion. Moreover, it is found that in many languages of China final particles are also used in wh-questions, including wh-question particles and particles in wh-questions.