Wh-questions and the verb to be.

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The questions above are examples of how we can use the WH-questions, but… what are the WH-questions?

The WH-questions are a series of words that we use to make questions in order to find specific information; all these questions start with WH-, except for one, but it’s included in this category.

WH-question words

Now that we know the WH- question words, let’s see how we can use them with the verb to be in a question.

Structure of WH-questions

Just like with sentences, questions also have their own grammatical structures. For the purposes of this lesson, we will only focus on the basic structure of a WH-question and the verb to be (añadir link a la entrada).

If you remember, the basic structure of a sentence is: Subject + verb + complement , however, since the verb to be can be used as an auxiliar in a grammatical sentence, we can also find:

Subject + aux + complement

Let’s take this structure as the base.

When we want to ask a question, any kind of question, the subject and the auxiliary will always exchange places and add a question mark at the end:

Aux + subject + complement + ?

To make questions with the WH- words and auxiliary verbs, we will always use the WH-words before the auxiliary verb, as follows:

Examples of WH-words + verb to be questions