The Hows of Why and The Whys of How

Abstract

0. How come how come? This paper sets out to investigate a curious how-why alternation, where how is construed as causal rather than manner. English, for one, provides an illustrious example: (1) a. How come Akiu left without saying anything? b. How is it that Akiu left without saying anything? Both (1a,b) are to be understood as a causal question, with how patterning with why and behaving more like a matrix predicate. However, this sort of construal is not productive enough in English to reveal the ins and outs of the how-why alternation. Chinese how, on the other hand, provides a full spectrum of interpretive possibilities such that we are able to piece together a clearer picture. Let's start with a brief preview of some interesting properties of zenme, a Chinese how, which has three types of interpretation: One is manner, which can be further divided into two subtypes, i.e., the method reading, as in (2a), and the style reading, as in

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.