CLA - Question Formation



CLA - Question Formation

How do we make questions?

In order to fully understand and comment on the grammar that children have to learn, you need to be able to analyse your own language use. You’ve know all this stuff since you were five, but you may not know all the technical terms to describe what you already know.

This resource is designed to give you the terminology (not to teach you what you already know about forming questions.) I’ve use colour coding to help you observe the points so make sure that you pay heed to the colouring.

There are FOUR main structures for question types in everyday conversation:

1. yes/no interrogatives,

2. wh-interrogatives,

3. alternative interrogatives,

4. tag questions.

In addition, raising intonation can indicate a question when the structure is declarative.

1. Yes/No questions are the ones that you have to answer “yes” or “no” to.

( (Is it rocket science?)

They are derived from basic sentence forms:

a) When there is an auxiliary, the auxiliary and subject are “reversed”.

(This is also called “inversion” in some text books.)

|statement (declarative form) |yes / no question (interrogative form) |

|You can dance. |Can you dance? |

|Steven will lead the team. |Will Steven lead the team? |

|You were late for the class. |Were you late for the class? |

|You are clever. |Are you clever? |

|I must study this. |Must I study this? |

| |In fact many students wouldn’t use this construction, they would |

| |say: “Do I have to study this?” |

| |or |

| |“Have I got to study this?” which just shows that we have some |

| |grammatical options. But yes, you MUST study this. |

b) When there is no auxiliary, a "DO" form is added.

(called a “dummy do” in some older text books)

|statement (declarative form) |question (interrogative form) |

|I like dancing. |Do I like dancing? |

|He likes dancing. |Does he like dancing? |

|Steven led the team. |Did Steven lead the team? |

|Sarah taught the class for you. |Did Sarah teach the class for you? |

|We studied this. |Did we study this? |

Note, in these questions the main verb loses its inflections (or changes to the infinitive form) :

LIKE, LEAD, TEACH AND STUDY

The person and tense are shown by the auxiliary (does, did)

Auxiliary Verb[i]

Not sure what an auxiliary is? The best definition of an auxiliary is actually that it’s the kind of verb that forms questions without using DO!

An auxiliary verb (or HELPING VERB) occurs with a MAIN VERB.

Examples:

(1) Susan has made a chocolate cake.

(2) Kate is talking to her boss.

(3) I do not like beans.

(4) The cat was chased by the blackbird.

BE is always classed as an auxiliary, even when there’s no other verb in sight – e.g. “He was tall”, “There was a crowd”

Some auxiliary verbs are known as modals:

will, would, shall, should, may, might, can, could, must, ought to

These auxiliaries express meanings such as permission (may), obligation (must), prediction (will) and they can also be used to form yes/no questions.

2. Wh_words or wh_interrogatives.

You’d think that grammarians would have made up a fancier term for this, but the “wh_ words” are called “wh_ words” in most text books, so we can stick with that easy-to-remember-term. Or you can call them interrogative words.

Some of them are interrogative pronouns: who, whom, what, whose and which.

Some of them are interrogative adverbs: how, why, when

Note that to make a wh_ question from a declarative we still invert the subject and auxiliary verb, or add DO, exactly as above.

|statement (declarative form) |question (interrogative form) |

|You can dance. |How can you dance? |

|Steven will lead the team. |When will Steven lead the team? |

|You were late for the class. |Why were you late for the class? |

|You are clever. |Why are you clever? |

|I must study this. |Why must I study this? |

| | |

|I like dancing. |Why do I like dancing? |

|Steven led the team. |How did Steven lead the team? |

|Sarah taught the class for you. |What did Sarah teach the class for you? |

|We studied this. |When did we study this? |

Do you notice that English speakers are very keen to preserve the link between the main verb and its subject? We rely on auxiliaries of one sort or another to indicate the question form so that the S.V. (subject verb) word order is kept. This is something we will consider again when we look at language change; the auxiliaries preserve the characteristics of all verbs in the Middle Ages. (The habits of the main verbs have changed.)

Think of Shakespearean English when you might have heard questions formed by inverting the verb and subject without adding and auxiliary:

|modern statement |Shakespearean-style question. |

|He dances. |Dances he? |

|He led the team. |Led he the team? |

|She taught the class. |Taught she the class? |

|We studied this. |Studied we this? |

Note: When the subject and verb are inverted the main verb keeps its inflections of person and tense.

3. Alternative Interrogatives.

A simple classification, these are questions characterised by the use of “or”. The answer has to be a choice between the options included in the question. The second half is said with a falling intonation (try it out loud and observe.)

• Do you want tea or coffee?

• Shall I print this out or just put it on the intranet?

• Would you like to play hide and seek or go on a swing?

NOTE: When my four year old nephew asked me this I realised that he is a budding politician; appearing to offer me a choice, but both more suited to his interests than mine!

4. Tag questions

You will recognise these as the bits tagged on the end of a statement, said in a rising intonation. You can debate their primary purpose. They are often used to seek agreement but can also be used to soften a criticism ro suggest irony:

• You are familiar with this form, aren’t you?

• We didn’t discuss this in class, did we?

• You won’t move from Stoke, will you?

• You live in Stoke, don’t you? (not liven’t you )

• He went to Uni, didn’t he? (not wentn’t he )

• Computers make life such fun, don’t they? (not maken’t they?)

What do you notice?

In the first three examples the verb TO BE or the auxiliary from the opening statement is re-used in the tag bit. In the rest we fall back on DO.

You can also see that we use a negative tag if the opening statement is positive.

On the other hand, we use a positive tag if the opening statement is negative.

Tags are often made from SVC statements (subject verb complement).

Is the copula verb is the verb TO BE (which is classified as an auxiliary) we re-use it in the tag:

• She is smart, isn’t she? She was there, wasn’t she?

• He is a winner, isn’t he? He was the scorer, wasn’t he?

If the copular verb is NOT the verb TO BE we use “do” instead:

• The cake tastes good, doesn’t it?

• The fire seems cool, doesn’t it?

What do Children Do?

McNeill (1970) identified three stages of development in children's production of question forms:

1. At first children use rising intonation to indicate a question (bikky?)and a few wh-words.

2. A wh-word may be used at the beginning of an utterance, but apart from that the utterance is no different from any statement: e.g. Where my mittens? Why you smiling?

3. Auxiliaries appear, but at first, in wh-questions, there is no inversion of the subject and the verb:

• What he can ride in?

• Why Kitty can't stand up?

However, children are able to produce correctly inverted yes/no questions: e.g. Can he ride in it?

After this they learn to match the adult target of wh-words and inversions and use the dummy auxiliary “do” to form questions.

Eventually they integrate the full range of modal auxiliaries into their repertoire.

The rate at which wh-words are used is related to their general cognitive development.

The younger a child is the more likely s/he is to use “what and where”. These are words she will have frequently heard to encourage her lexical development and are very firmly rooted in the concrete reality of her life.

A child’s use of “why and how” questions will increase over time, as s/he becomes more interested in more abstract ideas and in line with her cognitive development as a thinker. It is also true that children might recognise the function of “why” as a question, without being able to realise its limits, so you might hear “Why” questions which seem very strange to you as an adult. Many adults seem to think that children use “why” questions to “wind-up” adults; I’m not sure that this a scientific observation, although we have all been in a situation where the “why” sequence seems to run and run.

“Who and when” are generally the slowest wh-words to arrive. This reflects the conceptual difficulty that the concept of time presents to children. Why is “who” slower to arrive?

Key vocabulary – these are words you should feel confident with in relation to this topic:

• verb

• subject

• auxiliary

• modal

• wh_ word

• statement / question

• declarative / interrogative

• reverse / inversion

• tag question

• alternative

• rising and falling intonation

Use the links in the bibliography below if you need more help in grasping any of these ideas and the terminology that goes with them.

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Bibliography

University College London, Internet Grammar:

Lancaster University, CLA pages:

David Crystal, Rediscover Grammar. (dewey decimal number 425 in the library)

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