LingLunch : J. B. Kim

J. B. Kim (Seoul)
Similarities and Differences of How Come and Why Constructions: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives

The expression `how come' is a lot similar to `why' in both its usage and meaning, but also displays quite different properties. In this talk, I review grammatical properties of  English `how come' construction and discuss synchronic as well as diachronic corpus data to see how the construction has been developed over time and further how it is used nowadays. I then provide  a Construction Grammar approach that can capture both synchronic and diachronic aspects.