Kim Han-chang. 1998. A Semantic Analysis of Focused Yes-No Questions in English and Korean. Studies in Modern Grammar 14, 223-262. In this paper we have attempted to elucidate the relationship of alternatives to be focused in the three basic types of interrogatives(YNQ/AltQ/wHQ) in English and Korean and to classify the speech acts of yes-no questions making a contrastive analysis between the expressions of the two languages in terms of questions and answers. We reduce the speech acts of YNQs by considering various speech act conditions. Our investigation of the syntactic/semantic relationship between the basic types of interrogatives shows that the number of alternative variables determines the classification of these interrogatives: YNQ is restricted to only one focused item to be answered; AltQ is limited to more than one focused disjunctive items: WHQ provides the unlimited number of alternative variables from which to choose answers. These relational phenomena permit composite questions and composite answers besides simple ones. We insist that these composite questions and answers be dealt with in grammar books as particular types of discourse. As for the classification of speech acts we are confined to the YNQs in order to reduce the burden of investigation. The propositional content and illocutionary force were our main concern in dealing with YNQs. Our analysis indicates that the YNQs comprise many kinds of speech acts which ordinary learners of both English and Korean are not ordinarily aware of, We, however, reduced them to informative questions, assumptive questions, dubitative questions, directive questions, rhetorical questions, and reply questions. Our linguistic findings could be useful to the students of both languages. The method of study relies on discriptive approaches, leaving the formalization of linguistic findings to the task of formalists. Descriptivism has its own merits, because it provides data for formalists.