What is the right word order in sentence:
What would be the further steps?
or
What would the further steps be?
Learn English – Word order in: What would be the further steps
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What is the right word order in sentence:
What would be the further steps?
or
What would the further steps be?
Best Answer
They are both grammatical, but "What would be the further steps?" has a stylistic edge, because the alternative has a slightly complicated phrase, "the further steps", embedded within two parts of the same construction: "would ... be". Having a complicated phrase embedded within parts of a higher level phrase causes some difficulty in comprehension. Such constraints were first explored by Susumu Kuno, and they are discussed in several places in McCawley's The Syntactic Phenomena of English, which also gives references to Kuno's earlier work.
Haj Ross in his dissertation, Constraints on Variables in Syntax, proposed a transformation, Heavy NP Shift, to move complex NPs that are "trapped" between a verb and the particle that goes with it. E.g., "He looked all the addresses between here and the train depot up."
As the embedded phrase becomes more complicated, the comprehension problem gets worse, and it becomes stylistically more urgent to move the complex constituent to the end, to get it outside the parts of the larger construction. Compare: