Learn English – What does/do her parents do

grammatical-numbersubject-verb-agreement

  • What does her parents do?
  • What do her parents do?

Which one is correct? Can you have does and do in the same sentence like the first one? Would it be incorrect because parents is plural so do must be used throughout?

Best Answer

What do her parents do?

Here the subject of the sentence is her parents. Because her parents is plural the auxiliary verb DO must agree with the plural noun phrase, so we need do and not does. The auxiliary verb DO is the first verb in the sentence. This is the verb that moves in front of the subject. It has no meaning, it just helps to make the sentence a question.

The verb after auxiliary Do is ALWAYS an infinitive. It can never be "Xing", "Xs", "Xed" or "to X".:

  • Does he eats?
  • Did they went?
  • We don't liking...
  • They didn't to come.

It should be:

  • Does he eat?
  • Did they go?
  • We don't like ...
  • They didn't come.

We can only have one auxiliary verb DO in a sentence.

However, the second DO in the Original Poster's example is the main verb. It's the lexical verb DO. It isn't an auxiliary. Because it comes after the auxiliary DO, it must be in the infinitive. The verb after auxiliary DO is ALWAYS an infinitive. Therefore the sentence must be like this:

  • What do her parents do?

Hope this is helpful!

Related Topic