Correct use of do/are/come in question

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Hi folks. Its been a while, but I certainly received some excellent advice/support when I posted here a year or so ago. I now have another inquisitive Chinese pupil stretching my understanding of the English language!

Last week I asked her to write some questions based on answers I had extracted from a piece of text. One example was:
"Where are the students come from?"
My immediate reaction was to change 'are' with 'do', before realising that I could've also just left 'are' and removed 'come' for the sentence to also read correctly.
Can someone help explain how/why this works (in a way that I might be able to explain it to my young Chinese pupil) and whether or not either variation is more desirable. Thanks.

Will Gortoa
UK Teaching Assistant with no formal English training - other than 40 years using the language. Working with very inquisitive Year 9 pupil of Chinese origin. Helping to improve English usage understanding/skills.

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]"Where are the students come from?" My immediate reaction was to change 'are' with 'do', before realising that I could've ... able to explain it to my young Chinese pupil) and whether or not either variation is more desirable. Thanks.

[/nq]
Negatives and interrogatives are often best examined by working back from simpler declaratives. Here, that's:
The students are from X. (substitute any place name)

There, "from X" is a predicate adjective the "are" being copulative that describes "the students". Or one might equally well say:
The students come from X.
There, the present tense is demonstrating one of its typical uses, the expression of a "general truth" ("this engine runs well", a valid statement even if the engine is not running at that moment).(1)
When we make some other changes, though, we alter the sense a bit:
The students have come from X.
That is a statement in the present perfect tense, which is the form for indicating a past activity with some connection to the present, so being about a specified activity the sense is somewhat more literal: "come" is taken as meaning "arrived", and the statement is a more particular one about their recent travels, not a more general one about their place of residence.

Because we can use other auxiliaries in place of "have", that statement is equivalent to:
The students are come from X.
(That is an unusual but acceptable way of stating the fact, analogous to more common uses such as "The sun is risen.")
We can turn those various declarative sentences into queries by simply replacing the X with "where" and appending a question mark; that is not the standard form, but it is not rare either:

The students are from where?
Recast in the more normal word order for questions, that becomes:
Where are the students from?
Likewise, we can get:
From where did the students come?
Which readily becomes:
Where did the students come from?
But when we transform the present-perfect statements to queries, as with
Where are the students come from?
we see that it is a question about the recent travels of the students, and moreover, one in an unusual casting, the more ordinary form being:
Where have the students come from?
(1) A fair argument can be made that the verbs in those examples are each copulative, making what follows a predicate adjectival prepositional phrase.

Cordially,
Eric Walker
My opinions on English are available at
http://owlcroft.com/english/

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]"Where are the students come from?" My immediate reaction was ... whether or not either variation is more desirable. Thanks.

[/nq]
[nq:1]Negatives and interrogatives are often best examined by working back from simpler declaratives. Here, that's: The students are from X. ... can be made that the verbs in those examples are each copulative, making what follows a predicate adjectival prepositional phrase.[/nq]
Thanks for that thorough answer, Eric... Really useful.

Will Gortoa
UK Teaching Assistant with no formal English training - other than 40 years using the language. Working with very inquisitive Year 9 pupil of Chinese origin. Helping to improve English usage understanding/skills.

Correct use of do/are/come in question

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