What is an interrogative sentence?

An interrogative sentence asks a question, and it always ends with a question mark. (It's basically just a fancy name for a question.)

One thing that people struggle with when it comes to questions is identifying the subject. The subjects of questions can be hard to find because they typically come after the verb or between parts of the verb phrase. (In other sentence types, the subject comes before the verb.)

The good news is that you can rewrite questions in order to make the subjects easier to find! Yay!

How are you going to do this? You will change the question into a statement, and then the subject will be staring you in the face.

Question	Statement The subjects are underlined.
Is your house ready for visitors?	Your house is ready for visitors.
Have you brushed your teeth today?	You have brushed your teeth today.
Is this your jacket?	This is your jacket.

Sometimes questions sound funny when we turn them into statements. This is particularly true for questions that start with who, what, where, when, why and how. Sometimes the words who or what are the subjects.

Question	Statement The subjects are underlined.
Where is your house?	Your house is where.
When did you brush your teeth?	You did brush your teeth when.
How do I zip your jacket?	I do zip your jacket how.
Who is cooking the brownies?	Who is cooking the brownies.
What was your name?	What was your name.

Sentence diagrams are a way for us to SHOW how the words in sentences are related. We show these relationships without using any punctuation. Because of this, you will not see the question mark in a diagram of a question!

All sentences must contain a subject and a verb. Check out the diagrams below. On the left, you'll see a basic diagram of a subject and a verb. On the right, you'll see a sentence diagram for the question below.

If you'd like to learn more about the grammar of questions, click that link!