Lesson 9: Interrogative Sentences

Four Types of Sentences

Depending on their usage, sentences can be classified into 4 types: declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory. These 4 types of sentences are all composed of the same set of seven sentence elements listed in Table 4.1 of Lesson 4. Except the omission of the subject element in imperative sentences, the difference among sentences is largely in the arrangement of sentence elements and the use of some words typical to interrogative and exclamatory sentences.

A declarative sentence and an imperative sentence differs in that the former has a subject while the latter does not as shown in the following examples:

The following is a comparison between declarative sentences and exclamatory sentences:

It should be pointed out that an exclamatory sentence ends with the exclamatory point “!” .

Oftentimes, the subject element and verb element in exclamatory sentences is omitted. For example: "What a lovely baby!" is acceptable as a minor sentence.

In Lesson 4, we have discussed in detail the seven basic patterns of declarative sentences. In Lesson 6, we deduced unequivocally the seven basic patterns of verbal phrases from the seven basic patterns of declarative sentences. In this lesson, we will make use of the knowledge of seven basic patterns of declarative sentences to transform each of them into interrogative sentences. This unified approach should give our ESL readers a comprehensive understanding of English syntax. In essence, the set of seven basic declarative sentences is the lynchpin of English syntax.

Two Types of Interrogative Sentences

The two types of interrogative sentences, or simply “questions”, discussed in this lesson are:

(A) Yes-No Questions – A Yes-No question is a question that exacts a “yes” or “no” for an answer. In principle, any answer that does not include “yes” or “no” is considered as a non-answer, especially in a court of law. Yes-No questions are analogous to “True & False” questions. The answers “yes” is an affirmative marker, and “no”

The following are examples of Yes-No questions:

In the examples above,

· AV_int denotes interrogative auxiliary verb do, does or did.

· AV_1f = AV_per denotes perfect tense auxiliary verb have, has or had.

A comparison between the question and the answer, we note they differ in the following two respects:

1. Do-Support – It involves the use of an interrogative auxiliary verb “AV_int = do/does/did in

Yes-No questions. The subscript “int” stands for “interrogative”. The AV_int is placed at the

beginning of the question.

The interrogative auxiliary verb, AV_int, has no lexical meaning but is used as a particle to

mark a question. But not every interrogative sentence needs the “do-support”. Whether or

not the “do-support” is needed not only depends on the type of main verb in the sentence

and also depends upon the grammatical form of the verb element. See next section.

2. S-AV (subject-auxiliary verb) Inversion - In Yes-No question (2) above, the subject S is

sandwiched between the AV_per=have and the RVP=forgotten of the present perfect tense verb phrase VP = AV_per+RVP, and the auxiliary verb AV_per precedes the S. This is known as S-AV inversion.

(B) W-Word Questions – A W-word question is so named because, in contrast to declarative

sentences, which have the subject element S at the first element according to the basic patterns, the W-word questions are typified by a W-word at the beginning of the question. The following table lists the W-words classified according to their parts of speech:

The expected“answer”to a W-word question always emerge as a sentence element embedded at its appropriate canonical position in the declarative sentence that answers the question. Let

· X denote the sentence element embedded in a declarative sentence that answers the W-word

question. In other words, X stands for one of the sentence elements, S, dO, iO, sC, oC and

A in the declarative sentence that answers the W-question, and

· W(X) be the W-word that represents the unknown answer X in the declarative sentence.

It stands to reason that both the unknown answer X and the corresponding W(X)-word that represents it in the interrogative sentence have to perform the identical grammatical function. For instance, if the expected unknown answer X is the subject element S, i.e, X=S, and since the subject S is nominal, then the W-word that represents the subject S, i.e., W(X)=W(S), has also to be nominal. This means it can be a noun, noun phrase, gerund or dependent noun clause. The details of the transformation will be discussed in Section 9.4.

However, an interrogative W-word W(V) does not exist for X=V. In other words, we do not ask what the verb is. For instance, if we have a sentence “Your schoolmate came yesterday. - S + V + A.” One usually ask the three questions:

1. Did you schoolmate come? – a Yes-No question. The answer is yes or no.

2. Who came yesterday? W(S) question. The answer is

3. When did your schoolmate come? – W(A) question.

But one does not or cannot ask about the verb because there is no interrogative W-word for the verb element W(V) = came. The question “what did he do?” does not work.

Therefore, in the absence of an interrogative verb for the verb element, any N-element declarative sentence can give rise to only N-1 W-word interrogative sentences. For example, the declarative sentence S + V + dO has 3 sentence elements, i.e., N=3. Both W(S) and W(dO) exist, but not W(V). Hence, there can only be N = 3 – 1 = 2 W-word questions. The N-1 W-questions and one Yes-No question yield a total of N interrogative sentences for any declarative sentence.

Besides the Yes-No questions and W-word questions, there are the Alternative Interrogative Sentences. This type of questions, like the Yes-No questions, offers the respondent a choice. But a Yes-No question offers two implicit choices of “Yes” and “No”, while the choice offered by an alternative question is explicitly mentioned in the question itself. The following is a comparison among the three types of interrogative sentences:

It can be seen from the above examples that the alternative interrogative sentences and their answering statements are similar to those of the other two types. So, they are not to be discussed further.

Methods of Transformation to Yes-No Questions

As we have seen from the examples in Section 9.2 above, “do-support” and “inversion” are involved in the transformation of declarative sentences into Yes-No questions. Whether either one is required depends on the type (a). (b) or (c) of the verb element V in the declarative sentence as follows:

As shown above, the “do-support” is needed only when the verb element of the declarative sentence is realized by any intransitive or transitive verb without any auxiliary verb or the linking “verb to be” which happens to be the auxiliary verb for continuing tenses and passive voice sentences.

According to Lesson 4, the obligatory sentence elements of a declarative sentence are determined by the type of main verb that functions as the verb element. The verb element can be of Type (a), (b), or (c). The following table summarizes the methods of transformation to Yes-No questions for the seven Basic Declarative Sentence Patterns:

The Basic Patterns of Yes-No questions transformed from seven basic declarative sentences are given in Table 9.3 above. Please note:

· The Type of main verb is indicated in the left-most column.

· Because there are two types of verb element, (a) and (c) or (b) and (c) as shown in Table 9.3 above, each pattern of basic declarative sentences is transformed into a pair of Yes-No question patterns by two different methods I and III or II and III, as indicated in the right-most column.

· In the following sentence patterns, AV_1f is the first auxiliary verb in the verb phrase, RVP

is the remaining part of the verb phrase, AV_intf = do/does/did is the interrogative auxiliary verb, and BMV is the basic form of a main verb.

As can be seen:

· Basic Declarative Sentence Patterns (1) with Type (a) verb element and all other basic patterns with Type (c) verb element patterns of Yes-No questions do not need the “do-support."

· Basic Declarative Sentence Patterns with Type (b) verb element with BMV (basic form of main verb) all the other basic patterns of Yes-No questions need the “do-support with AV_intf”.

We now use these methods to transform each of the seven basic patterns of declarative sentences into Yes-No questions.

Transformation from Declarative Sentences to W-Word Interrogative Sentences

In this section, we discuss the transformation to W-word questions from declarative sentences. The transformation involves three steps:

· Step I : Do-support and subject-verb inversion or subject-auxiliary verb inversion for transformation into a Yes-No question.

· Step II : Substitution, and

· Step III: Migration

Steps II and III are for transformation into the remaining W-word questions.

Take for example,

(1) Basic Declarative Sentence: Johnny watched the movie last night.

Basic Declarative Sentence Pattern (5): S + V + dO + A (N= 4)

The N-1=3 W-questions are:

In 1, the W-word W(S) simply replaces S and remains as the first sentence element as shown in Section 9.2. In 2 and 3, W(dO) takes the place of dO, and W(A) takes the place of A (substitutions) and both are moved to the front of the W-word questions (migrations).

(2) Basic Declarative Sentence: Johnny has seen the movie.

Basic Declarative Sentence Pattern (4): S + V + dO + A (N = 4)

This declarative sentence has N=3 sentence elements. Therefore, there can be at most N-1 = 2 W-word questions. They are:

In (1), the W-word W(S) simply replaces S and remains as the first sentence element. In (2), W(dO) takes the place of dO (substitution) and is moved to the front of the W-word questions (migration).

Accordingly, we obtain all the patterns of W-word questions from the basic patterns of declarative sentences in Table 9 by using the Steps II and III.

In Table 9.5,

· VP = AV_1f + RVP, in which RVP stands for Remaining Verb Phrase,

· VP_int = AV_int (do/does/did) + BMV, in which BMV stands for Basic Form of Main Verb,

· N= number of sentence elements in the Basic Declarative Sentence Patterns, and

· n=1, 2, …N-1, where n = label of W-Word questions

The patterns (a)(1), (b)(1), and (c)(1) are patterns of W(S)-word questions. Their illustrative examples will be discussed in a later section.

Examples of W(S)-Questions

It should be noted that, since the subject element S is always the first sentence element in all seven canonical basic patterns of declarative sentence, and since the W-word is always the first element in a W-question, in the case of X=S, the order of sentence elements remains unchanged.

Examples of W(X not= S)-Word Questions

The transformation from declarative sentences to W(X¹S)-word questions involves the same three steps as to W(X=S)-word questions.

Step I: Do-Support or Inversion. This step is for Yes-No question.

Step II: Substitution

Step III: Migration

See examples below:

The following is an abbreviated reference to help identifying the pattern of W-word questions:

· N = number of sentence elements in Basic Declarative Sentence Patterns

· n = 1, 2, …, N-1 – a label for W-word questions. (The N-th question is a Yes-No question.

· AV_1f : the finite form of the first or the only auxiliary verb in the verb phrase VP.

· RVP: Remaining Verb Phrase

· BMV: Basic Form of Main Verb

(c) 2019 Augustine C. Chen