ABSTRACT
There is no inversion or other word order change in questions, even when the question is introduced by one of the interrogative elements. In all cases the presence of a question mark (often combined with an exclamation mark) is increasingly common, though it is strictly speaking redundant. Rhetorical questions are listed as a separate category though they cannot always be identified with certainty, especially in view of the variations in punctuation. It will be obvious that many of the examples here are taken from transcriptions into MWA of speech which may well have been originally in dialect. All that can be said is that the resulting written forms nevertheless represent at least an assumption of literary validity, even if occasionally the product is not very convincing. CA had no specific syntactical distinction between direct and indirect speech, that is, there was no regular shift of person and tense in indirect speech.
