Four and a half types of sentence

A slightly more technical term you might hear for words like 'what', 'who', 'where', etc. is 'interrogative word'. We're just going to stick with 'question word' on Writelike, because it's easier to remember.

Questions have a few nuances when it comes to their grammatical structure, which could be confusing if you try to analyse them using the methods we've developed over the previous lessons in this series.

But the differences really boil down to just a few rules, which we'll explain here just so you can see how they work:

1. The 'question word' always goes just before the verb group.

• Who ate the cake?
• What did Mimi eat?
• Where did Mimi eat the cake?
• Last night, how did Mimi eat the cake?

No matter what question we ask, the question word always comes before the verb group. Usually that means the question word will come right at the start of the sentence (but if a sentence has any modifiers—like "last night" in that final example—those can sneak in front).

2. The 'question word' fills the same clause component slot as the 'answer' would.

This is a little bit theoretical, but it will help explain the third 'rule' (to come).

If we answered the questions above with a statement, we can see that the 'question word' is standing in for the word group that is the 'answer':

• Who ate the cake?
  Mimi ate the cake.
• What did Mimi eat?
  Mimi ate the cake.

We can go one step further and say that the 'question word' is filling the same clause component slot.

The 'subject':

• Who ate the cake?
• Mimi ate the cake.

The 'complement':

• What did Mimi eat?
• Mimi ate the cake.

Or a 'modifier':

• Where did Mimi eat the cake?
• Mimi ate the cake in the kitchen.

3. The verb group gets split up when the 'question word' is not the 'subject' of the clause.

You've probably noticed something strange about some of these verb groups.

What did Mimi eat?
Where did Mimi eat the cake?
How did Mimi eat the cake?

It kind of looks like there are 2 verb groups in each question. which would normally mean there are 2 clauses. But really there's still only 1 verb group; it's just been broken up and the tense (shown by the tense helper, 'do') has swapped places with the subject, "Mimi".

This doesn't happen when the 'question word' is the subject:

Who ate the cake?

As we already saw, 'question words' always go in front of the verb group, so when the 'question word' is the subject, we can't do the swap!

You might have noticed something odd about that last snippet. There's no main verb!

Well, that's not entirely true. The main verb is 'are'. 'Being' verbs (like 'is', 'was', 'are') are a bit special and can do all sorts of things that other verbs can't.

For example, in the snippet above, 'are' is playing the role of both 'tense helper' and 'main verb'. Since we can only use one highlighter, we chose to highlight its role as tense helper because of how it swaps with the subject to form a question.

Note that 'being' verbs can also have separate verb helpers

There are some circumstances where you'll find 'being' verb questions with separate verb helpers.

For example, you might be using modal verbs to get a slightly different shade of meaning:

"Would you be familiar with the Latin term 'in loco parentis'?"

"No, we weren't going to live here forever."

Again, the asker is trying to get the responder to agree with their original statement: "We weren't going to live here forever."

There's a little bit of social manipulation going on here. The asker is trying to bypass the respondent's reluctance to leave by getting the respondent themself to admit that they can't stay where they are.

"Yes, we are blocked up."

The asker is trying to get confirmation that they understood the situation correctly.

"Yes, I do think I'm mighty smart!"

Actually, this is a bit of an odd one, because it's also drawing on a common social 'rule': "you should be humble and not brag about things like being clever". So even though the structure of the question is leading you to answer "yes", the responder will probably still want to answer "no".

The asker is purposefully creating a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. They're forcing the responder to either:

• Put in effort to break the natural flow and put themselves down in order to contradict the asker's opinion, or
• Break social norms and risk looking arrogant by admitting they have a positive trait.

Nasty!