The Development from Interrogative to Interjectional ‘Why’ in English

Abstract

This paper investigates the grammatical development from interrogative to interjectional ‘why’ in English. We suggest that the standing-alone ‘why’ question lacking in Tense underwent a functional shift to interjectional ‘why’ since it was not subject to ordinary but rhetorical ‘why’-questions. There are currently two uses of standing-alone ‘why’ interjection. One is ‘why (bother to say/ask this statement/question)’, which is the speaker’s protest against the speech act itself. The other is ‘why (so)’, with which the speaker evinces surprise at the described situation that the propositional ‘so’ represents. There are two more uses of interjectional ‘why’: pondering and consequence. We show that the former two uses are extended to the meanings of pondering and consequence ‘why’.