It is well-established that the linguistic form of the interrogative does not entertain a one-to-onecorrespondence to the speech-act of information requests. A series of “special questions” havebeen identified in the literature (Siemund 2001, Obenauer 2006, Bartels 2014 i.a.), but theirweight in actual usage remains to be established. This is what this base-line study accomplishesin a comparative perspective. It examines the form and interpretation of total and partialinterrogatives in comparable interactional exchanges in English and French, in order to assessexpectations about “special questions” and support future variationist and acquisitional work. Abrief foray into the behaviour of negative interrogatives suggests that the informational dynamicsin relation to the antecedent context is key to the understanding of interrogatives that do notrequest information.