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The English interrogative words (also known as "wh words" or "wh forms") are words in English with a central role in forming interrogative phrases and clauses and in asking questions. The main members associated with open-ended questions are how , what , when , where , which , who , whom , whose , and why , all of which also have -ever forms (e ...
(interrogative: what book is fronted, subject and verb are inverted, using do-support) However wh -fronting typically takes precedence over inversion: if the interrogative word is the subject or part of the subject, then it remains fronted, so inversion (which would move the subject after the verb) does not occur:
Whether a listener is present or not is sometimes irrelevant. It answers the question: "Why has this been said?" The five basic sentence forms (or "structures") in English are the declarative, interrogative, exclamative, imperative and the optative. These correspond to the discourse functions statement, question, exclamation, and command ...
Interrogative forms are sometimes known within English linguistics as wh-words, such as what, when, where, who, and why, but also include other interrogative words, such as how. This dependency has been used as a diagnostic tool in syntactic studies as it can be observed to interact with other grammatical constraints.
The interrogative words who, whom, whose, what and which are interrogative pronouns when used in the place of a noun or noun phrase. In the question Who is the leader?, the interrogative word who is a interrogative pronoun because it stands in the place of the noun or noun phrase the question prompts (e.g. the king or the woman with the crown).
The English pronouns form a relatively small category of words in Modern English whose primary semantic function is that of a pro-form for a noun phrase. [1] Traditional grammars consider them to be a distinct part of speech, while most modern grammars see them as a subcategory of noun , contrasting with common and proper nouns .
In linguistics and grammar, a sentence is a linguistic expression, such as the English example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."In traditional grammar, it is typically defined as a string of words that expresses a complete thought, or as a unit consisting of a subject and predicate.
An interrogative pro-form is a pro-form that denotes the (unknown) item in question and may itself fall into any of the above categories. The rules governing allowable syntactic relations between certain pro-forms (notably personal and reflexive/reciprocal pronouns) and their antecedents have been studied in what is called binding theory.