Word order and the syntax of question particles

Polar question particles may appear in various positions in the clause, usually initially or finally. When clause-final and co-occurring with verb-object word order, they violate an apparently valid linguistic universal, the Final-Over-Final Constraint. I consider the status of such particles, providing information about their distribution, before arguing that they may be analysed as either disjunction, heading an elided disjunctive clause, or as optional elements which are not obligatory ‘clause-typers’ but rather add some further, pragmatic information.