26.3263, Qs: English speakers: How come(s) can you say that?

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-3263. Mon Jul 13 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.3263, Qs: English speakers: How come(s) can you say that?

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Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2015 11:56:33
From: Richard Stockwell [rs654 at cam.ac.uk]
Subject: English speakers: How come(s) can you say that?

 
I am a Research Assistant on a project based at the University of Cambridge (Principal Investigator: Theresa Biberauer), investigating the structure of questions and commands for the influence they have on child language acquisition.

Our query concerns ‘How come…?’ questions. In standard British English, ‘How come...?’ questions have a different syntax from wh-questions more generally in that they do not trigger subject-auxiliary inversion:

(1) How come you can say that?

However, we have noted anecdotally that subject-auxiliary inversion is generalised to ‘How come…?’ questions in some varieties of English (2), and that some speakers have ‘comes’ (3) rather than ‘come’:

(2) How come can you say that?
(3) How comes you can say that?

Semantically, in standard British English ‘How come…?’ questions differ from neutral ‘Why…?’ questions in suggesting contrary expectation. For example, (4) suggests that the addressee should not be leaving:

(4) How come you’re leaving?

We are very eager to collect data on the syntax and semantics of ‘How come … ?’ questions across varieties of English, the range of possibilities and their distribution. 

Please email data from your variety of English to rs654 at cam.ac.uk and we will collate and summarise the results.
 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
                     Semantics
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): English (eng)



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