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Modality force and syntax in an understudied class of reduced why-questions in English

Paper · 2020 · Anissa Zaitsu

Summary

The paper looks at a frequent but little-studied English construction, which the author calls Why-VP: reduced questions such as why take Structure of Japanese? or why not take the bus?. These have no auxiliary, no tense, no inversion and no overt subject. Earlier accounts treated the form as special in two ways. They said it must be elliptical, and they said it must be rhetorical, a disguised suggestion. Both views required unusual compositional machinery.

The author works from 252 naturally occurring examples, each kept with its surrounding discourse. These come from the New York Times part of the Gigaword corpus, supplemented by web finds and informal acceptability judgments. On this basis, why is analysed as a head. It selects a silent infinitival head whose specifier holds a null subject, pro, and below that come ordinary Voice/V layers.

Because Why-VP is then a kind of infinitival wh-question, it inherits a covert modal meaning, as in Bhatt's account of embedded wh-infinitivals. That modal meaning explains both the frequent rhetorical flavour and the genuine information-seeking uses. No special pragmatic syntax is needed.

Key points

  • Data: 252 Why-VP tokens with full preceding and following context, drawn from NYT Gigaword (Graff & Cieri 2003).
    • They were found incidentally by the Santa Cruz Ellipsis Project (NSF #1451819).
    • They are released as a supplementary file.
  • The pattern works only with why. Who, what, where, when, how and how come cannot head a bare VP question.
  • Allowed and disallowed material:
    • Passive auxiliaries are possible.
    • Higher auxiliaries are excluded, such as perfect have and progressive be.
  • The natural paraphrase uses should or would, not past tense.
    • Why be kind to your husband? lacks the presupposition carried by why are you kind…?.
  • The silent subject is not always the addressee.
    • Reflexives such as ourselves and myself, and generic "anyone" readings, show 1st person, 3rd person and generic interpretations.
    • The subject must be construable as an agent. Compare #why suffer the insults with why suffer the insults silently.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The corpus was harvested as a by-product of a different annotation effort, with whole discourse windows kept so that context effects can be checked later.
  • I2. A bare verb directly after why (optionally after not) should be read as a root non-finite clause, not as a fragment with missing material.
  • I3. The verb in this frame is an infinitive, not a present-tense form, even though the two look the same.
  • I4. The suggestion or "don't do it" effect is derived from a covert should/would modal plus ordinary pragmatics, not hard-wired into syntax, so a literal-question reading always stays available.
  • I5. The implicit subject can be generic, the speaker, or a third party, and a reflexive in the clause reveals which.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (learn): When building silver data for one phenomenon, log stray constructions with their context windows, so they can become targeted evaluation sets later.
  • I2 (tree): Add a parser and treebank-conversion check that analyses why (not) VP? as an infinitival root with why attached to the bare verb, rather than guessing an elided auxiliary.
  • I3 (tokens): Let the tagger force VerbForm=Inf on the verb after sentence-initial why/why not, which removes a common VB/VBP confusion.
  • I4 (frames): Record Why-VP as a question with a covert deontic or circumstantial modal, and derive a "suggests not doing X" implicature only when context supports it, keeping both readings explainable.
  • I5 (frames): Resolve the hidden agent of Why-VP through coreference, using any reflexive as a hard cue and falling back to addressee or generic otherwise.

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

🎓Stanford UniversityStanford · United States434 works · 314,419 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 worksSyntax & grammar formalisms · 214 works

Cite

Cite as Anissa Zaitsu. 2020. Modality force and syntax in an understudied class of reduced why-questions in English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.870

@article{zaitsu2020modality,
  title = {{Modality force and syntax in an understudied class of reduced why-questions in English}},
  author = {Anissa Zaitsu},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.870},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.870}
}

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  43. How to cite this article: 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): 5. 1–37. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.870 ↗
  44. Submitted: 05 December 2018 find
  45. Published: 08 January 2020 find
  46. Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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