Questions without Auxiliaries.

banner image illustrating the grammar topic of subject questions without auxiliaries.

This is a guide to questions without auxiliaries, or “subject questions”. It is part of a complete class on question formation which is part of a complete upper-intermediate English course. Click here to go directly to the exercise.

Subject Questions: Questions without Auxiliaries.

Have you noticed that sometimes, a question like “Who wrote it?” or “Who sang the song?” doesn’t have an auxiliary verb like do, does or did?

You have probably been taught that questions in the present simple or past simple use the order:

  • Question
  • Auxiliary
  • Subject
  • Infinitive

For example:

QuestionAuxiliarySubjectInfinitive
Whatdo youwant?
Table showing normal word order for present simple or past simple questions with QuASI.

Sometimes they can just be:

  • Question word
  • Subject
  • Infinitive

For example:

QuestionSubjectInfinitive
Do you livehere?
Table showing normal word order for present simple or past simple questions with ASI.

But this isn’t always true!

Let’s look at some examples:

“Who did Lee Harvey Oswald kill?”

Is a normal question with the QuASI form that you saw above.

Questionauxiliarysubjectinfinitive
WhodidLee Harvey Oswald kill?

But this does’t work for all questions, look at this example;

“Who killed John F Kennedy?”

In this sentence there is no auxiliary verb!

Why and when do we omit the auxiliary verb?

We omit the auxiliary when the question word is the subject.

To identify the subject, look at who is “doing” the activity of the verb.

So in the example that we saw earlier,

“Who did Lee Harvey Oswald kill?”

we can see that the verb is kill. Who is doing the killing? Lee Harvey Oswald.

QuestionauxiliarySubjectInfinitive
WhodidLee Harvey Oswald kill?

But if we go back to the other example;

“Who killed John F Kennedy?”

and ask the same questions, which is the verb (kill) and who is doing the action of the verb, we can see that the subject is the question word “who”.

When the question word is the subject we must omit the auxiliary.

These questions that have no auxiliary are called “subject questions“, as the question word (who, which, what…) is the subject of the question.

Got it? Check your understanding with this interactive exercise.

Subject Questions Exercise