Sentence-level grammars would also indicate the placement of the be verb in questions. They would also discuss the formation of negative sentences. In English the no/ follows the be verb and can be contracted to It. | Chapter 13 Wh-Questions 243 adv sub I before Advl Advl Cl pro T V he -past quit Subject Wh-Questions Versus Predicate Wh-Questions Notice the fundamental difference between the two previous example questions. The derivation of the first one is straightforward. Since it is the subject that is being queried and since the subject is already in initial position in a sentence only the rules to copy subject person and number on tense and morphology are needed to derive the surface structure. Who wrote a memo to his boss before he quit output of base who -past write a memo to his boss before he -past quit copy s t who -past 3 sg write a memo to his boss before he -past 3 sg quit morphology Who wrote a memo to his boss before he quit It is a different story with the second question where it is the object NP that is being queried. In this tree we see that the information gap is in the predicate thus the wA-question word is not in the position it normally occupies in English. In order to deal with this matter we will have to move the wA-question word to the front of the sentence applying the derivation rule of wA-fronting. adv sub I before Advl Advl Cl 3 sg 244 The Grammar Book We cannot apply morphology at this point however. You will note that every question we generated above save the subject-based w i-question contains the do verb. This is because of the requirement in English that we invert the subject and operator if we have moved a wA-word from a position in the predicate to initial position. If there is no operator present one must be added by means of the operator addition rule. Q-wh SUBJ NP PRED Advl NP PrepP AUX -past do 3 sg write what Lee Prep NP to det before Advl Advl a adv sub SUBJ NP PRED operator addition his boss AUX VP N 0 N pro T V he -past 3 sg quit Then subject and operator can be inverted 3 sg Here s another example of a derivation where the missing information occurs in the predicate position in the underlying proposition the adverbial of time is .
