Syntactic differences between main verbs and auxiliary verbs: Negation placement (0.5 hours)

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In English, main verbs and auxiliary verbs do not just express different aspects of meaning; they also follow different rules in syntax. In this activity you will discover one example of these differences.

Let's think about how we can form questions from an English sentence.

Consider the following sentence:

He is angry.

How would you turn this sentence into a question? List all the possibilities.

The two possibilities I could think of are as follows:

  1. Is he angry?
  2. He is angry? (asked with rising question intonation)

For now we will ignore #2 and just focus on #1.

From this example we could conclude that the way to make a question in English is to move the verb to the beginning of the sentence.

Now consider this sentence:

He eats pie.

How would you make this into a question? Does it support or challenge my previous conclusion ("the way to make a question in English is to move the verb to the beginning of the sentence")?

In the previous question, you should have noticed that saying *Eats he pie? is not ok. Instead, the correct question is Does he eat pie?

Thus, my previous generalization ("you make a question by moving the verb to the beginning of the sentence").

Try to state a rule about how verbs in English move to create questions. Keep in mind the distinction between main verbs and auxiliary verbs (which kind of verb is is, and which kind of verb is eats?). Don't search for a rule online; the purpose of this activity is for you to try thinking of a rule yourself. I don't care if your answer is correct or not, I just care that your answer demonstrates your own thinking.

When you have finished these activities, continue to the next section of the module: "The Inflectional Phrase".


by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2021-04-23. CC-BY-4.0.