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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.g ...
The most common use of subject–auxiliary inversion in English is in question formation. It appears in yes–no questions: a. Sam has read the paper. – Statement b. Has Sam read the paper? – Question. and also in questions introduced by other interrogative words (wh-questions): a. Sam is reading the paper. – Statement b. What is Sam reading?
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 following examples of sentence pairs illustrate wh-movement in main clauses in English: each (a) example has the canonical word order of a declarative sentence in English, while each (b) sentence has undergone wh-movement, whereby the wh-word has been fronted in order to form a direct question.
In grammar, a content clause is a dependent clause that provides content implied or commented upon by an independent clause. The term was coined by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen. Content clauses have also traditionally been called noun clauses or nominal clauses, but current linguistics tends to view those names as misnomers and prefers ...
A clause is often said to be the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. [1] But this semantic idea of a clause leaves out much of English clause syntax. For example, clauses can be questions, [2]: 161 but questions are not propositions. [3] A syntactic description of an English clause is that it is a subject and a ...
English adjectives, as with other word classes, cannot in general be identified as such by their form, [24] although many of them are formed from nouns or other words by the addition of a suffix, such as -al (habitual), -ful (blissful), -ic (atomic), -ish (impish, youngish), -ous (hazardous), etc.; or from other adjectives using a prefix ...
Interrogative sentences are generally divided between yes–no questions, which ask whether or not something is the case (and invite an answer of the yes/no type), and wh-questions, which specify the information being asked about using a word like which, who, how, etc.