(a) Time may be flying.
(b) May time be flying?
(10) (a) Time has been flying.
(b) Has time been flying?
The auxiliary verb which moves in such cases is either a modal or the
auxiliary which is bearing the tense (sometimes called the
operator). Because the movement covers only the one auxiliary,
we'll just call it INVERSION, leaving it to you to remember what gets
inverted.
Not all declarative sentences have auxiliary verbs to move, of course.
The general rule is that we cannot move the main verb itself in INVERSION.
Shakespeare could do so, but if we do so these days people look at us
oddly, though they may understand us. Shakespeare's time had a rule we
could call SUBJECT-VERB INVERSION, but we are stuck with our more
complicated form of INVERSION. If the tense is on the main verb, we
generally have to insert a form of do to carry the
tense:
(11)(a) My aunt diets.
(b) *Diets my aunt? UNACCEPTABLE
(c) Does my aunt diet? ACCEPTABLE
One of the things that makes our INVERSION rule complicated is that
there are two exceptions to the rule that main verbs can't move.
Be and have, which can serve as auxiliary verbs, can
move even when they are main verbs. Even this exception has to be
qualified a bit: The main verb be always moves in INVERSION, but
the main verb have can either move or let do do the work
for it:
(15)
(a) Time is money.
(b) Is time money?
(16) (a) Time has no pity
(b) Has time no pity?
(c) Does time have no pity?
One of the subtle differences between Standard British English and
Standard American English is that questions like (16)(b) are much more
common in British usage than in American. Standard American English
prefers the use of do when have is a main verb.
The process where by do is added to carry the tense after
INVERSION is called DO-INSERTION or DO-SUPPORT, and it has
other uses as well, as we'll see in our next section. It is used even
when the main verb is do
itself.
(17) (a) Time did this.
(b) Did time do this?
Exercise 1: Reversing Yes/No Question Formation
For the following questions, give the
equivalent statement before
INVERSION and (possibly)DO-INSERTION have applied.
1.01 Do soldiers waltz?
1.02 Does George waltz?
1.03 Does linguistics waltz?
1.04 Did your brother do this?
1.05 Have you seen Tom waltz?
1.06 Is my hair flat?
1.07 Was Grant buried in Grant's Tomb?
1.08 Should I leave you two alone?
1.09 Will it hurt?
1.10 Have you heard?
Diagramming the Tense/Modal Constituent. We have seen that to
be grammatically complete, all sentences must have a modal auxiliary
or a verb inflected for
tense. One of the
virtues of looking at simple questions is that they show that this
tense/modal constituent can be thought of as separate from the rest of the
predicate, since it is moved around the subject in questions. We
will want to include this INFL (for "INFLection") element in our
sentence diagrams:
Notice that we have labelled it -Pst. That stands for not
past tense, just as +Pst would stand for past tense.
Using plus and minus signs this way allows us to use just one label
(Pst) for tenses. It also captures the fact that we tend to assume
by default that sentences are present tense unless they are specially
marked otherwise; for that reason, linguists would speak of the
present tense as the unmarked tense. We don't really need to label
the INFL component at all. We are doing so here just for completeness,
rather as we are adding in the not-strictly necessary N and
V labels. Our diagrams are still rather small, so we have plenty
of room.
We might, however, want to reconsider using S (for
sentence) at the top of our diagram. What we have is a diagram of
an independent clause, a clause that can stand by itself as
a sentence. We are going to use this pattern over and over, though, and
it will sometimes be used for just part of a sentence. What we really
have, then, is something like this:
Diagramming a Simple Yes/No Question. Thinking of our sentence
structure this way helps us to use our diagram for a simple declarative
sentence as part of our diagram for a simple yes/no question. In the
diagram below, the question is a sentence which is marked as a question
(+Q) about the statement which follows. The INFL element has been
moved to show that it is a question, leaving behind it a trace
where it has been--the trace (t) represents our knowledge
that the tense embodied in does applies to the verb fly:
This last diagram brings us closer to the
kind of trees used by at least some linguists. In a little bit, we'll try
to move closer, at the cost of having to learn some more abstract labels.
Problems With INVERSION and Do. Yes/no questions, even
with DO-INSERTION, are a pretty basic part of English, and few speakers
have trouble with them. The most frequent error seems to be omission of
the tense element altogether, especially in
informal speech:
(18) *You crazy?
(19) *You been busy?
(20) *Time fly?
Such expressions should be avoided in writing and in formal speech, and
those who can't switch between their use and non-use are the ones most apt
to need to study the question rules.
How Much of This Will be on
the
Test?
By this time you should be able to recognize the most common forms of the
different sentence types: exclamatory, imperative, declarative,
interrogative. The main lesson in this section is that the
interrogative sentence form has a tensed verb or modal moved in
front of subject, a process called INVERSION. Where there is no auxiliary
verb and main verb is other than be (or optionally,
have, DO-INSERTION supplies do as the operator to
carry the tense. In our diagrams, we'll show this movement as leaving a
trace behind. Any other terms can always be looked up in the Glossary. You should be able to reverse
the processes involved in making yes/no questions without changing the
tense, and you should be beginning to
make sense of our phrase-structure trees.