InterrogativeAn interrogative clause is a clause whose form is typically associated with question-like meanings. For instance, the English sentence "Is Hannah sick?" has interrogative syntax which distinguishes it from its declarative counterpart "Hannah is sick". Also, the additional question mark closing the statement assures that the reader is informed of the interrogative mood. Interrogative clauses may sometimes be embedded within a phrase, for example: "Paul knows who is sick", where the interrogative clause "who is sick" serves as complement of the embedding verb "know".
Yes–no questionIn linguistics, a yes–no question, also known as a binary question, a polar question, or a general question, is a question whose expected answer is one of two choices, one that provides an affirmative answer to the question versus one that provides a negative answer to the question. Typically, in English, the choices are either "yes" or "no". Yes–no questions present an exclusive disjunction, namely a pair of alternatives of which only one is a felicitous answer.
DeterminerA determiner, also called determinative (abbreviated ), is a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and generally serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner may indicate whether the noun is referring to a definite or indefinite element of a class, to a closer or more distant element, to an element belonging to a specified person or thing, to a particular number or quantity, etc.
Preposition and postpositionPrepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (in, under, towards, before) or mark various semantic roles (of, for). A preposition or postposition typically combines with a noun phrase, this being called its complement, or sometimes object. A preposition comes before its complement; a postposition comes after its complement.
Do-supportDo-support (periphrastic do or do-insertion), in English grammar, is the use of the auxiliary verb do, including its inflected forms does and did, to form negated clauses and questions as well as other constructions in which subject–auxiliary inversion is required. The verb "do" can be used as an auxiliary even in simple declarative sentences, and it usually serves to add emphasis, as in "I did shut the fridge." However, in the negated and inverted clauses referred to above, it is used because the conventions of Modern English syntax permit these constructions only when an auxiliary is present.
Function wordIn linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. They signal the structural relationships that words have to one another and are the glue that holds sentences together. Thus they form important elements in the structures of sentences.
Pronunciation of English ⟨wh⟩The pronunciation of the digraph in English has changed over time, and still varies today between different regions and accents. It is now most commonly pronounced /w/, the same as a plain initial , although some dialects, particularly those of Scotland, Ireland, and the Southern United States, retain the traditional pronunciation /hw/, generally realized as ʍ, a voiceless "w" sound. The process by which the historical /hw/ has become /w/ in most modern varieties of English is called the wine–whine merger.
Possessive determinerPossessive determiners are determiners which express possession. Some traditional grammars of English refer to them as possessive adjectives, though they do not have the same syntactic distribution as bona fide adjectives. Examples in English include possessive forms of the personal pronouns, namely: my, your, his, her, its, our and their, but excluding those forms such as mine, yours, ours, and theirs that are used as possessive pronouns but not as determiners.
Content clauseIn 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. They are also known as noun clauses. In English, there are two main kinds of content clauses: declarative content clauses (or that-clauses), which correspond to declarative sentences, and interrogative content clauses, which correspond to interrogative sentences. Declarative content clauses can have a number of different grammatical roles.
ComplementizerIn linguistics (especially generative grammar), a complementizer or complementiser (glossing abbreviation: ) is a (part of speech) that includes those words that can be used to turn a clause into the subject or object of a sentence. For example, the word that may be called a complementizer in English sentences like Mary believes that it is raining. The concept of complementizers is specific to certain modern grammatical theories. In traditional grammar, such words are normally considered conjunctions.
