Peculiar Usages of What and Why with Extralinguistic Information

Abstract

English wh-phrases are divided into two major categories in school grammar in Japan: the interrogative pronouns (who(m), whose, which, what); the interrogative adverbs (when, where, why, how). However, such a categorization is only made to capture the basic properties of the wh-phrases, and it is argued in this paper that what and why have several usages that cannot be explained by the categorization. A peculiar usage of what appears when it co-occurs with the verb care: in this case, what behaves like an adverbial phrase and gets the interpretation of why. As for why, it differs from other wh-phrases in that it can make a unique stripping sentence: Why-Stripping. Importantly, these types of what and why both imply speaker’s emotion, such as anger, annoyance or surprise; and such discourse-related information is confirmed more effectively in movies rather than in novels. This is because, compared to written English, conversations in movies provide us with rather informative evidence such as symbolic facial expression and/or an unusual way of talking. Thus, employing movie data, this paper also argues that movies are convenient learning/teaching tools to foster better understanding of the wh-phrases in English.