In the book "Analysing Sentences" by Noel Burton-Roberts, there's an exercise on drawing phrase markers for the 2 sentences "What is a phonologist?" and "Who is a phonologist?". I assume that the syntax trees for them would be different from each other (otherwise the writer wouldn't have put them in the same exercise.) Someone, please enlighten me on this. I'm a student and interested in English Syntax.
1 Answer
When you ask "What is a phonologist?", the answer will be: "a phonologist is someone who studies the sound patterns of language". So the "what"-question targets the property which is represented by the predicate of the copula construction.
The answer to "Who is a phonologist?" might be "Richard is a phonologist, and Aditi is also a phonologist". This question targets the subject of the copula construction.
