Wednesday, June 14, 2017

word choice - What colour eyes

I've just stumbled on this sentence What colour eyes does she have? in my grammar book. What got me interested in this is the combination of the words colour, eyes with what and without any prepositions.



I just assume a construction like this is possible with some particular words such as colour, form, shape, size and so on. These words have ranges or multiple possibilities.



Let me try this out.





What size sofa did you buy?




Since I think it's similar to what kind of car do you have construction, I don't have to use an article before sofa or do I?




What shape pancakes does the shop sell?





Are these 2 correct / possible? They make sense?



Any thoughts on this? Am I even right or it's just an insane theory? haha



UPDATE: Ok I can conclude people have different takes on this. So I want to ask you guys a couple of more things that will help me to understand this point better



1) If I always use "of" in such cases, will it always be correct?



2) What do we do with an article if we have a singular noun? optional or needed? From what I gather if we have "of" we need or opt for an article. If we don't we have to drop it. Is it like this? These below are just examples but I'm asking about a general idea for this kind of sentences
What size (a) sofa did you buy?
What shape of (a) pancake did she buy?

No comments:

Post a Comment