Yes Tickets

Yes and no, or word pairs with a similar word, are expressions of the affirmative and the negative, respectively, in several languages including English. Some languages make a distinction between answers to affirmative versus negative questions; thus they may have three-form or four-form systems instead. English originally used a four-form system up to and including Early Middle English but Modern English has reduced this to a two-form system consisting of just 'yes' and 'no'. It exists in many facets of communication, such as: eye blink communication, head movements, Morse Code, and sign language. Some languages, such as Latin, do not have yes-no word systems.

Some languages do not answer yesses with single words meaning 'yes' or 'no'. Welsh, Finnish and Chinese are among the languages that typically employ an echo response (repeating the verb with either an affirmative or negative form) rather than using words for 'yes' and 'no', though such languages can also have words broadly similar to 'yes' and 'no'. Echo responses avoid the issue of what an unadorned yes means in response to a negative question. While a yes response to the question "You don't like strawberries?" is ambiguous in English, the Welsh response ydw (I like) has no ambiguity.

The words yes and no are not easily classified into any of the eight conventional parts of speech. Although sometimes classified as interjections, they do not qualify as such, and they are not adverbs. They are sometimes classified as a part of speech in their own right, sentence words, word sentences, or pro-sentences, although that category contains more than yes and no and not all linguists include them in their lists of sentence words. Sentences consisting solely of one of these two words are classified as minor sentences.