Did you know that there are different question types?
Really? Like what?
Well, why don’t we sort through some questions and see what we can figure out.
Okay.
Here are some sentences with some words missing.
We’ll put the missing words and phrases on the side here.
Could you fill in the blanks to make some nice questions?
Sure, give me a minute.
(mumbling)
… Done!
How’s that?
That’s good!
What do you notice about the colors?
All the words in a column are the same color.
That’s right.
I made those words the same color for a reason.
Can you tell me what they have in common?
Start with the green ones.
They’re all ‘wh-’ words, or question words.
Very good!
Now, what about the pink ones?
Oh, these are little words we use all the time...
They’re, um, helping verbs, right?
Or auxiliary verbs.
Yeah, that’s right!
And the yellow ones?
Those are nouns.
Yeah, there are different kinds of nouns. Which ones are these?
Hm.
They come after the verbs, so … ‘objects’?
Well done!
And some of those objects are a part of a prepositional phrase.
You mentioned verbs.
Where are those?
In the second-to-last column of each group.
Cool.
There’s one last set of columns we need to figure out.
Those are nouns.
What kind?
Well, they’re the nouns doing the verb, I think, so ... 'subjects'?
Nice job! You figured out all of the columns!
Great!
But why are they in different groups?
Because we have three different types of questions here.
We name them based on the answers we’re looking for.
Let’s consider some possible answers for each group.
“A cat was making that noise.”
“Lindsey sent the gift.”
“Orange is my favorite color.”
“Bobby ran away.”
Okay, ‘cat’, ‘Lindsey’, ‘Orange’, and ‘Bobby’ are all …?
Subjects!
Right!
So this is a group of Subject Questions.
Cool.
What about this next group?
Some answers might be: “Yes, we did!”
“No, not yet.”
“Sure.”
and “No.”
Okay, this group should be easy.
These are Yes-or-No Questions!
Very Good.
And the last group?
“In Madrid.”
“Next Year.”
“To my mom.”
“Three romance books.”
Okay.
Some of these are in prepositional phrases, but the important words are what?
Nouns.
Objects!
Excellent!
So these are Object Questions.
Let’s take a look at Yes/No Questions and Object Questions together.
What do you notice?
They’re almost the same.
Almost.
What’s the difference?
The Object Questions have ‘wh-’ words, but the Yes/No Questions don’t.
The rest is the same.
Very good.
Let’s take a closer look at turning a Yes/No Question into an Object Question.
Okay.
Suppose we think we know what Kelly did last weekend,
but we’ll ask a Yes/No Question to make sure.
“Did Kelly play guitar in the park on Saturday?”
Now suppose we’re missing one of those details,
so instead we should ask a wh- question to learn more.
Okay.
How many objects are there?
Three: guitar, park, and Saturday.
Then we can have three different Object Questions.
We’ll start with a Yes/No Question each time and change it from there.
We add a question word, right?
Right, but to figure out which question word,
we first need to decide what answer we’re looking for.
What do you mean?
Suppose we know that Kelly played something, but we don’t know what she played.
Our first question is which instrument or game or whatever she played.
Oh, I get it.
So we can’t have ‘guitar’ in the same question because that’s the thing we don’t know.
Yep!
And what kind of noun is ‘guitar’, or whatever else she might play?
Is it a person, or a place, or a thing…?
It’s a thing.
What question word do we use for things?
‘What’.
We’ll put that at the front.
And that’s all it takes!
Cool!
What about the next one?
What if we don’t know the place she played guitar?
The answer we’re looking for is ‘in the park’, or ‘at home’ or wherever.
The question word for places is ‘where’.
Yep.
Can you do the last one by yourself?
Yeah.
If we don’t know when she played, we take ‘on Saturday’ out of our question.
‘When’ is the question word we use for times and days and whatever.
Well done.
And that’s how we do Object Questions.
We can shorten some of these sentences if we like.
Cool.
Object Questions are pretty easy.
I’m glad you think so.
Let me add one more note though:
For both Yes/No Questions and Object Questions,
in the auxiliary verb column we need exactly one auxiliary verb.
What if the verb has multiple auxiliaries?
Then only the first one goes in the pink column.
The rest go together with the main verb.
Okay.
But what if you don’t have any auxiliary verbs?
That’s what the word ‘do’ is for.
It’s like a spare auxiliary verb; we add it when we don’t already have one.
Got it.
Let’s move on to Subject Questions.
These are a bit different from the other two types.
They don’t have a ‘subjects’ column.
Sure, the subjects aren’t in the question because, well, that’s what we’re asking for.
Right.
They don’t have auxiliary verbs, either.
Well, there might be auxiliary verbs,
but they’re together with the main verbs, so you have the whole verb string together in one column.
And if there aren’t any auxiliary verbs, that’s okay.
Oh, okay.
But instead of comparing Subject Questions with the other two types,
let’s try something better.
Like what?
Look at the answers you made earlier.
Do they look familiar?
Hm.
Oh, I see!
The questions and the answers have the same word order.
Yeah, so if we want to turn a declarative sentence into a Subject Question,
that's pretty simple.
All we have to do is replace the subject with the right question word.
And that’s it!
We don’t even have to move any words around.
That’s correct!
Pretty easy, right?
Yeah.
That’s all you need to know for most questions.
But suppose you want to ask for something very specific.
Like what?
Like you want to identify some dogs.
You might ask ‘Whose dogs are these?” or “Which dogs ate my slippers?”
or "How many dogs do you have?”
Right…
Well, we have to add another column for ‘dogs’, or whatever the general noun is.
Oh, okay.
Like, out of this category, we’re asking for something more specific.
Right.
And this is the case when we use the question words ‘which’, ‘whose’, ‘how many’, 'how much',
and occasionally ‘what’.
We can use them for both question types, right?
And the rest of the sentence would be the same.
That’s right.
Here’s our last note: If our verb is TO BE, some of these columns might change a bit.
Oh no!
Do I need to remember all these separately from the other question types?
Not really.
Can you make Yes/No Questions with BE?
Yeah, I can do those.
Well, remember that all you have to do is
take away the unknown and add a question word at the beginning to make it an Object Question.
Oh yeah!
And if you can make a declarative sentence with BE,
then just swap the subject with a ‘wh-’ word to form a Subject Question.
I can do that!
Yeah, you can!
No matter what verbs you’re dealing with,
forming Subject and Object Questions is just a step or two away from the most basic sentence structures.
Great!