Editing English grammar (section)

==== Interrogative ====
The [[interrogative pronoun]]s are ''who'', ''what'', and ''which'' (all of them can take the suffix ''[[-ever]]'' for emphasis). The pronoun ''who'' refers to a person or people; it has an oblique form ''[[whom]]'' (though in informal contexts this is usually replaced by ''who''), and a possessive form (pronoun or determiner) ''whose''. The pronoun ''what'' refers to things or abstracts. The word ''which'' is used to ask about alternatives from what is seen as a closed set: ''which (of the books) do you like best?'' (It can also be an interrogative determiner: ''which book?''; this can form the alternative pronominal expressions ''which one'' and ''which ones''.) ''Which'', ''who'', and ''what'' can be either singular or plural, although ''who'' and ''what'' often take a singular verb regardless of any supposed number. For more information see [[Who (pronoun)|''who'']].

In Old and Middle English, the roles of the three words were different from their roles today. "The interrogative pronoun ''hwā'' 'who, what' had only singular forms and also only distinguished between non-neuter and neuter, the neuter nominative form being ''hwæt''".<ref>{{Cite book|title=The Cambridge history of the English language: Volume I|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=1992|isbn=|editor-last=Hogg|editor-first=Richard|location=Cambridge|pages=144|oclc=}}</ref> Note that neuter and non-neuter refers to the grammatical gender system of the time, rather than the so-called natural gender system of today. A small holdover of this is the ability of relative (but not interrogative) ''whose'' to refer to non-persons (e.g., ''the car whose door won't open'').

All the interrogative pronouns can also be used as relative pronouns, though ''what'' is quite limited in its use;<ref name="Huddleston phrasal genitive" /> see below for more details.