0

I have one doubt about making questions, especially WH questions.

While making the direct questions, I have been taught to make sentence like, 1) WH + auxiliary+ subject+verb Example: what do you want?

But I have seen people using like, What you want? There is no auxillary word in it.

So is it right or wrong? What about your opinion?

And also is it feasible, that whatever we speak, the opposite person should understand in a language be it direct or indirect questions?

2
  • Forms like What you want? strike me as stereotypical of Far Eastern non-native speakers. I'm guessing this is because their languages don't use auxiliary verbs as much as English (similar to the fact that Russian doesn't use articles as much as English, making things like Where is bus station? a stereotypical Russian tourist question). Also note that native speaker may massively "understress" d'ya == do you in the cited context - which native speakers would rarely even notice, because they know what words must be there, but nns may simply assume there was nothing there anyway. Commented Sep 18, 2017 at 15:48
  • 2
    "What you want?" is either dialect or "broken" English, depending on who is talking. Either way I would not recommend you use this in ordinary conversation. It might be fine with friends, as long as you understand the grammar is not really "correct". Also, I don't understand your second question.
    – Andrew
    Commented Sep 18, 2017 at 15:48

1 Answer 1

2

Omission of the auxiliary verb in questions is common for ESL speakers, and also occurs among native speakers in very informal usage and in certain regional dialects, however it is not considered correct.

Direct questions are perfectly understandable even if the auxiliary verb is omitted, because there are plenty of other clues: the inflection, the ungrammatical sentence "what you want", a non-native accent, etc.

Indirect questions are easily identified by the question-phrase, for example "Could you tell me..." so there is no risk of confusion between an indirect question and a direct question without auxiliary.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .