Let’s say you’ve asked the question that constitutes the title of this post. It would be weird and at best a joke for us to respond ‘clearly’ or ‘definitely’ or ‘actually’, because that’s not what you’ve asked us. That’s surprising. Much of the time, how questions can be answered with adverbs like these. How did Floyd leave? Quietly. How did Clyde react? Indignantly. How will he respond? Judiciously.
But that’s not the only thing how questions can do. They can also ask for general descriptions. How do you like this paragraph? And the previous one? How was it? These can’t easily be answered with just an adverb. More natural answers describe general properties. You might say that this paragraph was useful, but the previous one sadly disappointing. These aren’t simple adverb answers. Yet this too is not the effect of the question in the title.
It’s not well understood how any of these effects are achieved. More generally, with a few notable exceptions, we don’t have a very well developed understanding of the semantics of how questions. That’s an issue to which our lab has recently turned, including at least four distinct but closely related lines of research. These include work on how questions in different related languages spoken in China (Mandarin and Changsha Hua) and in Ktunaxa (an endangered language spoken in British Columbia, Idaho, and Montana), and on an intriguingly idiosyncratic question word in Dutch that is also ultimately a cousin to how (about which there is a separate post below).
Our immediate focus in this post concerns a another line of research: What makes it possible for how in English to sometimes mean something like why? That’s what happens in the title of this post, and it’s different from the uses of how we mentioned above. It’s not asking for a simple adverb answer that communicates the way in which something happened, and it’s not even asking for a general impression of something. But then what is it asking?
One clue is that although such how questions resemble why questions, they are not identical to them. There is a clear difference between these examples:
How is this a blog post?
Why is this a blog post?
They both seem to demand implicitly that this post provide an account of itself. The why question asks about reasons. Why did we choose to post this thing, of all things? Might it have been better to post something else, or nothing at all? Alternatively, might it have been better for this, whatever it is, to have been expressed in some other form (a sonnet, perhaps, or a cartoon). But that’s not what the how question asks. It’s not about reasons or causes. It’s about justifications. How could this blog post be regarded as a blog post? Indeed, inserting ‘could’ into the question doesn’t change its meaning much:
How could this be a blog post?
That, we conjecture, may be the key. This sense of how differs interestingly from others in a number of respects, but perhaps the most revealing is that it seems to have a kind of built-in ‘could’, or more precisely, an element of possibility (as reflected even more clearly in paraphrases like ‘How could this possibly be a blog post?’). Words that express what’s possible or necessary are called modals, so this species of how could be said to have a built-in modal component.
Why might how work this way? You can find more on this subject here. The really surprising thing, though, is that this apparently odd use of ‘how’ is not at all a quirk of English. Counterparts of this effect appear across all the typologically diverse languages mentioned above. Why? We don’t yet know. How? We’re working on it.
by Starr Sandoval & Marcin Morzycki