Diagramming pronoun "whose"

[egao_gakari]

OK, picky question here. I never learned diagramming as a kid, so I've been "learning along" with my kids through FLL and now GWTM. I was under the impression that any question sentence needs to be rephrased as a statement and then diagrammed. So "What is this?" should be re-worded as "This is what," with "this" in the subject space and "what" in the predicate nominative space. But GWTM says that the sentence "Whose are these lovely mittens?" should be diagrammed with "Whose" in the subject space and "mittens" in the PN space. 

Whose | are \ mittens   This looks wrong to me. Shouldn't it be    mittens | are \ Whose     like this?

[Lori D.]

In that example of "Whose are these lovely mittens?" -- The subject is mittens, not whose. I've only ever seen "whose" used as a type of interrogative adjective. ("whose mittens")

 

Edited October 9, 2019 by Lori D.

[kbutton]

8 hours ago, egao_gakari said:

Shouldn't it be    mittens | are \ Whose     like this?

I would also say this is correct. Interrogative sentences almost always have the subject after the verb or in the middle of it, such as in "Are you going to the store?" or "Is the the tomato ripe?"

[egao_gakari]

Thank you both! I was pretty sure the book was mistaken, but I was also insecure about it 😄

[MeghanS]

It's been a year and a half, so you may not even see this, but I have been wrestling with this exact example all day! Did you end up teaching your kids to rephrase interrogative sentences to more easily find the subject? There are several examples in the workbook that place 'whose' as the subject...or 'which'. Did you stick with what people recommended here or come to understand what WTM was getting at? Thank you for any help you can offer me!