What is "are you" in the question
"Are you going to the beach?"
I thought it might be a verb phrase but when I looked up the definition of this type of phrase in the WJEC A Level English Language terminology glossary it says
"A phrase made up of a single lexical verb, or up to four auxiliaries and a lexical verb"
Examples given along with the definition are:
"follows, was following, should have been following, may have been being followed".
Are is the sentence's verb, the head word of the verb phrase are going.
You is the sentence's subject.
The order is V-S instead of S-V because it's a question.
"be going to" is a pattern or idiom in English language. It means, that something will be done for sure.
"am", "is", "are" - are forms of the verb "to be":
I am (not I be), You/We/They are (not you/we/they be) and He/She/It is (not He/She/It be)
For example:
According to the English rules to form an interrogative question we should situate a main verb at the first place, but after a question word.
In the sentences above the main verbs are: "am", "is", "are".
So, the interrogative questions are:
We use the verb "are" with "you" regardless you address to a single person or to several people.
Simplified tree diagram:
The clause exhibits subject-auxiliary inversion, as expected in this kind of interrogative construction. The auxiliary verb "are" is treated as a pre-nucleus related to the predicator which is represented by 'gap' in the nucleus clause, with both items cross-referenced with the subscript index i.
This may all seem a bit complex, but the tree is useful for analysing the functions of the subject and auxiliary verb in such interrogatives
