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Dependent interrogative pronoun
A dependent interrogative pronoun or interrogative determiner is an interrogative pronoun used as a dependent pronoun determiner within an interrogative noun phrase.
Form[edit | edit source]
In English, only three of the interrogative pronouns can be used as determiners, namely what, which and whose. For example:
- What time will you come?
- Which one do you want?
- Whose car do you want to go in?
The phrasal head is the noun that is determined, e.g. the syntactic head of what time is time, not what.
As determiners, they are not used with other determiners, e.g. *the which one? or *which the one?
The interrogative pronouns who (and whom) are not used. So we don’t say, e.g. *who person is coming? — but the others can be used to refer to people; e.g.
- Whose child is the tallest?
- Which employee is paid the most?
- What person would vote to make themselves poorer?
Traditional grammar[edit | edit source]
In traditional grammar, these pronouns were misanalysed as adjectives, hence the really rather stupid name interrogative adjective. They don’t form interrogative adjective phrases, which consist of how + Adj.
