We categorize factoid questions used in a question-answering system into copulatives, that ask about a state, versus non-copulatives, containing a main non-copulative verb. We present a novel ranking method for non-copulative questions that uses the question head as an anchor for selecting the target subtree in the parse tree of the candidate sentence. The semantic similarity of the action in the selected subtree to the action asked by the question is verified using WordNet on their main verbs. For verifying the syntactic similarity of this subtree to the question's parse tree, syntactic restrictions as well as word-based measures compute the unifiability of critical syntactic participants in the trees.