I’m confused as to if
do we actually know where we are going any more
is a question or not, because of the ‘do’ I think yes but when read it seems like a sentence.
Answer
Apart from the gut reaction “yes, it is a question because, um, it just is”, we can actually approach this systematically. The sentence exhibits three characteristics that are of interest to us:
- It says “do… know” rather than just “know”,
- it says “do we” rather than “we do”,
- and last but not least, it begins with a verb.
Each of these by itself can occur in a number of different scenarios:
- “Do… know” could be an emphatic do (“I do like this”), or it could be an auxilliary do (do-support), and the latter could indicate a question (“Do we know?”) or a negation (“We do not know”).
- “Do we” (subject–auxiliary inversion) could indicate a question (“Do we know?”), or negative polarity when there’s a fronted adverbial that is a negative trigger (“Never/seldom/under no circumstances do we know”).
- A verb at the beginning could indicate a question (“Do we know?”) or an imperative (“Do this now!”) or a simple ellipsis (“I like whistling. Do it all the time.”)
As you can see for yourself, the only scenario in which all three meet is a question.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : IBTrey , Answer Author : RegDwigнt
