Aboutwhat about: the semantics and syntax of irregularwh-questions in English

Abstract

AbstractAlthough often used as diagnostic tools in discourse studies, irregularwh-questions in English, which take the form ofwhat/how about … ?andwhat/how if … ?, have not received sufficient attention in terms of their semantic and syntactic properties. This article investigates irregularwh-questions from semantic and syntactic perspectives. Semantically, there is a topic-comment relationship between thewh-word and the rest of the sentence. Syntactically, an irregularwh-question neither displays an explicit matrix subject-predicate structure nor involves a fronted auxiliary. This article pursues three objectives. First, a descriptive overview of irregularwh-questions is provided, which shows that the complement ofaboutin irregularwh-questions can belong to various syntactic categories. Second, the topic-comment structure of irregularwh-questions is compared with that of the topic-comment structure in declarative sentences, which reveals some semantic properties of irregularwh-questions. Third, a formal account of irregularwh-questions is formulated in the framework of Dynamic Syntax, which captures the interaction of the semantic and syntactic properties of the components of an irregularwh-question. Additionally, the present dynamic account of irregularwh-questions is contrasted with an existing dynamic account of the hanging topic construction in English, which highlights some merits of the current account.