Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2025 / English <em>why not</em> fragment questions: A corpus-based perspective

English <em>why not</em> fragment questions: A corpus-based perspective

Paper · 2025 · Okgi Kim and Jong-Bok Kim

Summary

The paper studies English why not used on its own as a fragment question (WNFQ). Such fragments have two readings. The anaphoric one is information-seeking and asks for the reason behind a salient negative proposition ("He didn't read it." / "Why not?"). The rhetorical one usually signals acceptance of a suggestion or offer ("Let's go." / "Sure, why not?"). Earlier accounts treat the anaphoric type as ellipsis: a full negative clause is reconstructed and then deleted, and the leftover not is treated as semantically empty, tied to the hidden negation by negative concord. The authors challenge this view with attested cases involving constituent negation and with cases where the negativity comes only from context. They also report a COCA study that codes each antecedent for polarity, negation type and clause type. The corpus results show that resolution depends strongly on context. As an alternative, they propose a direct-interpretation analysis in construction-based HPSG. In it, not is a propositional anaphor that projects a non-sentential utterance, and the utterance's content is supplied by a QUD-structured discourse. This handles both readings uniformly and treats WNFQs as a kind of why-stripping.

Key points

  • Anaphoric WNFQs need an antecedent with sentential negativity. This can come from not, never, barely, nobody or no, and Klima's neither-tag test is the diagnostic. Lexical negation (refuse, unwilling) and constituent negation are usually reported as bad, yet COCA contains counterexamples such as "thinking of not going. / Why not?"
  • Negativity can be implicit. It can arise through Neg-raising ("I don't think he'll comply, but I don't know why not") or through the pattern "why or why not".
  • Rhetorical WNFQs need an antecedent with modal force. Typical antecedents are a suggestive imperative, a modalized declarative, or a polar-question request. Context can supply this force, as in "Jasmine went to the movies again!"
  • Corpus study. COCA tokens were coded for antecedent polarity, negation type and clause type. The quantitative results undermine negative-concord ellipsis analyses.
  • Proposed semantics. Information-seeking why asks for a reason for the proposition picked up by not. Rhetorical why acts as a negative quantifier, so "why not p" becomes ¬∃x[reason(x) & ¬p], read as "one should p". The same mechanism derives "Why dance?" as "we shouldn't dance".

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Treating a bare not (in "why not", "I think not", "if not") as a pronoun-like anaphor for a salient proposition avoids rebuilding hidden clauses, so one mechanism covers many fragment types.
  • I2. The two readings come from two lexical functions of why: a reason query, or a negative quantifier meaning "there is no reason that ¬p". The second yields a "should p" assertion that pragmatically counts as acceptance.
  • I3. Licensing conditions differ by reading: the anaphoric use needs sentential negativity, while the rhetorical use needs a modal or directive antecedent. The clause type of the antecedent therefore predicts the interpretation.
  • I4. Klima's neither-tag test is a cheap probe that separates sentential negation from constituent or lexical negation.
  • I5. Coding corpus hits by antecedent polarity, negation type and clause type turns a theoretical claim into checkable distributions.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): prag could resolve fragment not/so by linking it to the most salient proposition frame in the discourse and negating it, rather than copying syntax.
  • I2 (frames): the speech-act layer could label "Sure, why not?" after a suggestion as an acceptance act whose content is the suggested frame, instead of a real question.
  • I3 (answer): when a reader meets "why not?" in tale dialogues, it can first check whether the prior turn was a negated event or a proposal, and then decide whether to look up a reason or record agreement.
  • I4 (learn): it could generate paired probe sentences and negative controls that check whether the parser and frames assign negation the correct scope.
  • I5 (learn): evaluation sets for ellipsis and fragment resolution could be stratified by the same variables, so that failures show up per antecedent type.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Kyung Hee UniversitySeoul · South Korea5 works · 176 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksCoreference resolution · 574 works

Cite

Cite as Okgi Kim and Jong-Bok Kim. 2025. English <em>why not</em> fragment questions: A corpus-based perspective. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.17414

@article{kim2025english,
  title = {{English <em>why not</em> fragment questions: A corpus-based perspective}},
  author = {Okgi Kim and Jong-Bok Kim},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.17414},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.17414}
}

References

44 references, 4 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Alves-Castro, Marian. 2020. ‘why not’ and other patterns of negative why-stripping. In López Ropero, Lourdes & Garcia-Cañedo, Sara Prieto & Sánchez Fajardo, José Antonio (eds.), Thresholds and Ways forward in English Studies, 168–178. Alicante: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante. find
  2. Austin, John Langshaw. 1975. How to do things with words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard university press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198245537.001.0001 ↗
  3. Bromberger, Sylvain. 1992. On what we know we don’t know: Explanation, theory, linguistics, and how questions shape them. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. find
  4. Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 1 billion words, 1990– 2019 (COCA). Available online at www.english-corpora.org/coca/. find
  5. Fernández, Raquel & Ginzburg, Jonathan & Gregory, Howard & Lappin, Shalom. 2007. Shards: Fragment resolution in dialogue. In Bunt, Harry & Muskens, Reinhard (eds.), Computing meaning, 125–144. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5958-2_6 ↗
  6. Fernández-Pena, Yolanda & Pérez-Guerra, Javier. 2024. Why why-fragments? A corpus-based constructionist analysis of their form and meaning. In Maci, Stefania & Garofalo, Giovanni (eds.), Investigating discourse and texts: Corpus-assisted analytical perspectives, 131–160. Lausanne: Peter Lang. find
  7. Fitzpatrick, Justin. 2005. The whys and how comes of presupposition and NPI licensing in questions. In Alderete, John & Han, Chung-hye & Kochetov, Alexei (eds.), Proceedings of the 24th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 138–145. Citeseer. find
  8. Francez, Itamar. 2015. Modern-Hebrew lama-še interrogatives and their Judeo-Spanish origins. Journal of Jewish Languages 3. 104–115. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/22134638-12340048 ↗
  9. Ginzburg, Jonathan & Gregory, Howard & Lappin, Shalom. 2000. A dialogue system for interpreting fragments. In Hinrichs, Erhard & Meurers, Detmar & Wintner, Shuly (eds.), Proceedings of the ESSLLI 2000 Workshop on Linguistic Theory and Grammar Implementation, 187–199. find
  10. Ginzburg, Jonathan & Sag, Ivan A. 2000. Interrogative investigations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  11. Griffiths, James. 2019. A Q-based approach to clausal ellipsis: Deriving the preposition stranding and island sensitivity generalisations without movement. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1). 12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.653 ↗
  12. Griffiths, James & Güneş, Güliz & Lipták, Anikó. 2023. Reprise fragments in English and Hungarian: Further support for an in-situ Q-equivalence approach to clausal ellipsis. Language 99(1). 154–191. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2023.0000 ↗
  13. Guerzoni, Elena & Sharvit, Yael. 2014. Licensing and sensitivity in polarity items: from downward entailment to nonveridicality. In Crnič, Luka & Sauerland, Uli (eds.), The Art and Craft of Semantics: A Festschrift for Irene Heim, MITWPL 70, 199–224. find
  14. Halle, Morris & Marantz, Alec. 1993. Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection. In Hale, Ken & Keyser, Samuel J. (eds.), The view from Building, vol. 20. 111–176. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. find
  15. Han, Chung-hye. 2002. Interpreting interrogatives as rhetorical questions. Lingua 112(3). 201– 229. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0024-3841(01)00044-4 ↗
  16. Hofmann, Lisa. 2018. Why not? – polarity ellipsis and negative concord. Lingua 116. 1651–1669. find
  17. Hofmann, Lisa. 2022. Anaphora and negation. PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz. find
  18. Hofmann, Lisa. 2023. Negativity without negation. In Onoeva, Maria & Staňková, Anna & Šimík, Radek (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 27, 309–327. ↗
  19. Hooper, Joan B. 2012. On assertive predicates. In Kimball, John (ed.), Syntax and Semantics 4, 91–124. New York: Academic Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004368828_005 ↗
  20. Horn, Laurence R. 1978. Remarks on neg-raising. Pragmatics. 129–220. DOI: https://doi.org/10. 1163/9789004368873_007 ↗
  21. Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316423530 ↗
  22. Kaufmann, Magdalena. 2011. Interpreting imperatives. Springer Science & Business Media. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2269-9_6 ↗
  23. Kim, Jong-Bok. 2021. Fragment questions: A direct interpretation approach. Linguistic Research 38(3). 445–468. find
  24. Kim, Jong-Bok. 2024. Fragment answers with negative dependencies in Korean: A direct interpretation approach. Linguistics 62(2). 385–419. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0134 ↗
  25. Kim, Jong-Bok. 2025. (Negated) fragment answers in English: A discourse-oriented and construction-based perspective. English Language and Linguistics 28(3). 553–588. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674324000285 ↗
  26. Kim, Jong-Bok & Abeillé, Anne. 2019. Why-stripping in English: A corpus-based perspective. Linguistic Research 36(3). 365–387. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17250/khisli.36.3.201912.002 ↗
  27. Klima, Edward. 1964. Negation in English. In Fodor, Jerry & Katz, Jerrold (eds.), The structure of language: Readings in the philosophy of language, 246–323. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. find
  28. Kramer, Ruth & Rawlins, Kyle. 2009. Polarity particles: an ellipsis account. In Schardl, Anisa & Walkow, Martin & Abdurrahman, Muhammad (eds.), Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society 39 (NELS 39), 479–492. find
  29. Krifka, Manfred. 2013. Response particles as propositional anaphors. In Snider, Todd (ed.), Proceedings of the Semantics and Linguistic Theory 23 (SALT 23), 1–18. DOI: https://doi.org/10. 3765/salt.v23i0.2676 ↗
  30. Meijer, Anna Marlijn. 2022. Propositional anaphora: The case of embedded polar responses in Dutch and English: Universität zu Köln dissertation. find
  31. Merchant, Jason. 2001. The syntax of silence: Sluicing, islands, and the theory of ellipsis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199243730.001.0001 ↗
  32. Merchant, Jason. 2004. Fragments and ellipsis. Linguistics and philosophy 27. 661–738. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-005-7378-3 ↗
  33. Merchant, Jason. 2006. Why no(t)? Style 40(1&2). 20–23. find
  34. Merchant, Jason. 2012. Ellipsis. In Alexiadou, Artemis & Kiss, Tibor & Butt, Miriam (eds.), Handbook of Contemporary Syntax. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. find
  35. Needham, Stephanie Maureen. 2012. Propositional anaphora in English: The relationship between so and discourse: Carleton University dissertation. ↗
  36. Ortega-Santos, Iván & Yoshida, Masaya & Nakao, Chizuru. 2014. On ellipsis structures involving a wh-remnant and a non-wh-remnant simultaneously. Lingua 138. 55–85. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.lingua.2013.10.008 ↗
  37. Quirk, Randolph & Greenbaum, Sidney & Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Longman Publisher. find
  38. Reinhart, Tanya. 1991. Elliptic conjunctions–non-quantificational LF. In Kasher, Asa (ed.), The Chomskyan turn, 360–384. Oxford: Blackwell. find
  39. Roberts, Craige. 2012. Information structure: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. Semantics and Pragmatics 5(6). 1–69. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.6 ↗
  40. Sadock, Jerrold M. 1974. Towards a linguistic theory of speech acts. New York: Academic Press. find
  41. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.1017/CBO9781139173438 Stockwell, Richard. to appear. Elliptical why not. Syntactic Theory & Research. ↗
  42. Yoshida, Masaya & Nakao, Chizuru & Ortega-Santos, Ivan. 2015. The syntax of why-stripping. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 33. 323–370. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9253-9 ↗
  43. Zaitsu, Anissa. 2020. Modality force and syntax in an understudied class of reduced why-questions in English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.870 ↗
  44. Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2004. Sentential negation and negative concord. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: University of Amsterdam dissertation. find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/kim-2025-english-em-why-not-em/