Hi Shizuka,

That’s a very good question – I think you’re absolutely right to look at it that way, referring to them as Object Questions is limiting. It serves a particular purpose, to differentiate between a question that asks about the subject and one that asks about the object, but I don’t believe the two types accurately cover all kinds of questions. I’d typically break questions down more relating to how they are structured, if they are simple yes/no questions or use a question word, or are a tag question, for example, before looking at whether they relate to the subject or other information. Then to differentiate between a subject question or not I would ask if the question word represents the subject or not (i.e. is the subject present in the question):
-Did James open the door? (James did the verb)
-What did James open? (James did the verb)
-Who opened the door? (unknown subject)
The third is clearly a subject question, the second is an object question, but even though the first is clearly not a subject question, it is not asking for an object either – it’s a yes/no question, I would leave it at that. Likewise your questions such as ‘when’ or ‘where’ are unlikely to ask about an object as such, but may also clearly not be subject questions. Essentially, it’s the difference between if we have the subject present in the question or not, and I think you’re finding these other examples are defining ‘object’ questions as any where the subject is known, so we are asking for more information, not for the subject. It’s useful when creating questions to know if it’s a Subject question or not, but trying to differentiate between Object questions and ones asking for other information is probably less useful, I think.

Concerning the subject of “questions” in English, I understand that there are two main types, namely Subject questions and object questions.

As the terms imply, object questions are mainly concerned with finding out information about the object of a sentence, while subject questions are concerned with the subject of the sentence.

Simply examples are as follows:

Sentence: James dropped the glass.

Object question: What did James drop?

Subject question: Who dropped the glass?

However, I’ve also come across the following part of a grammatical text which says that the following are examples of Object questions:

Where do you live?
Did you go shopping yesterday?
When are they going to arrive next week?

Here is my question – shouldn’t the answers to object questions be the objects themselves such as “glass” being the answer to the object question “What did James drop?”? If so, the answers to “Where do you live?” or “Did you go shopping yesterday?” could be “I live in Japan” and “Yes, I did go shopping yesterday”. Now if that’s the case, “in Japan” isnt a direct object since “live” as In “I live in Japan” is an intransitive verb, and neither is “shopping” the direct object of “I did go shopping yesterday”. If so, how can these be called Object Questions?

Would greatly appreciate your advice, thanks!

Regards,
Shizuka