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I do self-study for some English exam and this is a sentence from some online resource, which I suppose to listen and write down. 

"Does the university have an ice-hockey team?"

In my opinion, since the university is singular, the word 'have' should be replaced with 'has'.

Please enlight me if I am wrong.

Kushan Randima
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    You would say (1) It *has* one hockey team, and (2) It *has* two hockey teams. Similarly, you would say (1) Does it *have* one hockey team?, and (2) Does it *have* two hockey teams? The singularly or plurality of the object makes no difference. – Jason Bassford Jan 18 '19 at 04:40
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    The construction is "Does [subject] [infinitive]". The infinitive is not conjugated; only the "helping verb" do is conjugated to agree with the subject. Likewise, we say "The university does have an ice-hockey team", "Will the university have an ice-hockey team?", "The university will have an ice-hockey team", "Did the university have an ice-hockey team?", "The university did have an ice-hockey team." – sumelic Jan 18 '19 at 04:45
  • @sumelic I see, I wasn't careful enough to see that. I'll delete my comment with the "supposed" duplicate question, as it's not a duplicate. – Zebrafish Jan 18 '19 at 04:58

1 Answers1

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Does the university have an ice-hockey team?

The sentence is grammatical; it's not correct to use has instead.

You can use "has" in an affirmative sentence as follows:

The university has an ice-hockey team.

But you don't use "has" with the auxiliary verb do, does or did in an interrogative or negative sentence; you always use the root form of the verb i.e. "have". Another example:

Does Kushan goes to university?

The sentence is not correct. The noun Kushan is singular third person. Even then you don't use "goes"; you use "go" instead.

Khan
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