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I don't know whether or not these sentence are correct. The following sentence shows below.

"What things can make you cry?"
"What can things make you cry?"

I have found some article about auxiliary verb. The following question "What is different between “What is the dog can do?” and “What can the dog do?” (ELL link here).

I still don't know Whether or not the two sentences are right or wrong. I want put a noun in my question like "things" in the example sentences above. I konw "What can make you cry?" is correct.

Please tell me which is right or both of them are right or wrong, and why?

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  • You can think of the word what itself as a kind of "noun" (e.g. - What I like is chocolate, where what = chocolate = [noun]), so you don't need to explicitly provide another noun to go with it. You can just ask What makes you cry? rather than What things make you cry?, and this is what most native speakers would usually do. Nov 23, 2019 at 14:15
  • It's worth adding that 'What can things make you cry' and 'What is the dog can do' don't make any sense. Nov 23, 2019 at 14:28
  • @FumbleFingers I want to ask others "what can different things make you anxious?" or "what different things can make you anxious?". I think that I want to emphasize "different things" because I want to interview some people from different country which have something different to our country.
    – 000
    Nov 23, 2019 at 15:27
  • None of that makes any difference. You could perhaps ask people What three things make you cry [most]? if you particularly wanted everyone to list three different things in their answer, but I don't think there's any short natural way to ask What makes you cry? with the implication that you want at least two different things in each answer. Even if you ask What things make you cry?, you might get the one-word answer Onions! Nov 23, 2019 at 16:25
  • @FumbleFingers So does that imply that both of the two example sentences are wrong? Does that mean I cannot add "can" if I add that the sentences are wrong?
    – 000
    Nov 24, 2019 at 4:18

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