falling pitch: Est-ce qu'il est ↗riche? OR Est-ce qu'il est ↘riche? The most formal form for a yes/no question, which is also found in both spoken and written French, inverts the order of the subject and verb. There too, the spoken question can end in either a rising or a falling pitch: Est-il ↗riche? OR Est-il ↘riche? Sometimes yes/no questions begin with a topic phrase, specifying the focus of the utterance. Then, the initial topic phrase follows the intonation pattern of a declarative sentence, and the rest of the question follows the usual yes/no question pattern: Et cette pho↘to, tu l'as ↗prise?...... Information question pattern Information questions begin with a question word such as qui, pourquoi, combien, etc., referred to in linguistics as interrogatives. The question word may be followed in French by est-ce que (as in English "(where) is it that ...") or est-ce qui, or by inversion of the subject-verb order (as in "where goes he?"). The sentence starts at a relatively high pitch which falls away rapidly after the question word, or its first syllable in case of a polysyllabic question word. There may be a small increase in pitch on the final syllable of the question. For example: ↗Où ↘part-il ? OR ↗Où ↘part-↗il ? ↗Où ↘est-ce qu'il part ? OR ↗Où ↘est-ce qu'il ↗part ? OR Où ↗est-ce qu'il ↗part ? ↗Com↘bien ça vaut ? OR ↗Com↘bien ça ↗vaut ? In both cases, the question both begins and ends at higher pitches than does a declarative sentence. In informal speech, the question word is sometimes put at the end of the sentence. In this case, the question ends at a high pitch, often with a slight rise on the high final syllable. The question may also start at a slightly higher pitch: Il part ↗où? OR ↗Il ↘part ↗où? Mandarin Chinese Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language so pitch contours within a word distinguish the word from other words with the same vowels and consonants. Nevertheless, Mandarin also has intonation patterns that indicate the nature of the sentence as a whole. There are four basic sentence types having distinctive intonation: declarative sentences, unmarked interrogative questions, yes–no questions marked as such with the sentence-final particle ma, and A-not-A questions of the form "He go not go" (meaning "Does he go or not?"). In the Beijing dialect, they are intonationally distinguished for the average speaker as follows,