Which Comes First? Who or Where?

I saw a "family calendar" for sale in a gift shop last week. Underneath the label was the explanatory phrase: “Who does what and goes where when.” That phrase is a good illustration of several rules about how we form questions in English that you may not have considered before. 

Direct and indirect questions

First, let’s talk about whether that description of the calendar is actually a question. It wasn’t punctuated with a question mark, after all. It wasn’t asking me personally, as I stood there looking at it, “Who does what? Who goes where when?” Instead, the description was telling me, “This calendar will answer the questions of who does what, and who goes where when.” Or at least, it will after I buy it and fill in all those names, dates, and locations! 

Questions that are implied as part of a statement are called indirect questions. Unlike a direct question like “What did you do?” an indirect question isn’t a complete sentence. Instead, it acts as a noun phrase inside a larger sentence; for example, it could be the direct object of a verb like “know” in “I’d like to know who does what and goes where when.” I used an indirect question as the object of the preposition “of” a few sentences ago when I said, “the question of who does what and goes where when.” In other words, an indirect question is a kind of noun clause. If you want to know more about noun clauses, we talked about them in episode 410. 

Now, let's take a look at some grammar rules that apply to both indirect and direct questions.

Joining entire questions with ‘and’

Let’s take a close look at the word “and” in this calendar description. The “and” joins two verb phrases that contain question words: “does what” and “goes where when.” So the question as written on the front of the calendar is a shorter way of writing two questions: 

“Who does what, and who goes where when.”

So one way of asking about more than one thing at a time is just to use the conjunction “and” to join your two questions. Who are you, and what do you want? Where are we going, and when will we arrive?

‘Who’ and ‘what’ in the same question: Subject comes first

For the second way of asking about more than one thing at a time, we can look at the two questions from the calendar separately. 

Let...

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