When speakers of most varieties of English think of how come, we come up with sentences such as (1) below.

(1)

How come he left the party?

A different construction exists in certain dialects of English, as shown in sentence (2):

(2)

How come him to leave the party? (Johnson, 2014)

English, like many other languages, makes a distinction between finite clauses—for example, those with past, present, and future tense verbs—and non-finite clauses, which include those where the verb is in infinitival form (like to leave, to eat, to be, etc). In most varieties of English, how come can only be followed by a finite clause, such as he left the party in (1) above. However, in (2), how come occurs in a non-finite clause. This type of sentence is acceptable for speakers of some dialects of American English, and we will refer to it as “non-finite how come.”

Who says this?

In the present day, non-finite how come is predominantly found in Appalachian English, which is spoken mainly in regions on or near the Appalachian Mountains, ranging from Ohio to Georgia. Examples of the construction appear in historical records of formal and informal speech and writing in a much wider region, spanning the American South, starting as early as the mid-1800s with evidence until the late 1930s (see ‘Historical background’ for more details).

In their Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English, Montgomery and Heinmiller (2021) provide some fairly recent examples of the non-finite how come construction from native speakers of the dialect, such as (3):

(3)

... and that’s how come her to be in Matewan. (Montgomery and Heinmiller, citing Accord, 1989)

Very little research into non-finite how come exists, so we don’t know whether the construction is still present in areas in the South beyond Appalachia, or areas outside the South entirely, but many native speakers of Appalachian English certainly still use it today (Johnson, 2014).

Syntactic properties

Most of the observations in this section are drawn from Johnson (2014), with some additional examples drawn from other sources.

Subject-auxiliary inversion

The meaning of how come is similar, though not identical, to the meaning of why. Therefore it is useful to compare the two in order to highlight the properties of how come. One difference is that, in matrix questions, why requires subject–auxiliary inversion, whereas how come does not. This is shown in the sets of sentences below:

(4)

Subject–auxiliary inversion

a) Why was he working on Saturday?

b) Why have they left their work unfinished?

c) *How come was he working on Saturday?

d) *How come have they left their work unfinished?

(5)

No subject–auxiliary inversion

a) *Why he was working on Saturday? (no inversion)

b) *Why they have left their work unfinished?

c) How come he was working on Saturday?

d) How come they have left their work unfinished?

Auxiliaries in English include some senses of be (e.g. “I was working”) and have (e.g. “I have eaten”). Usually, in interrogatives, the auxiliary precedes the subject. This occurs with why, but notably not with how come—notice that if we try to perform subject–auxiliary inversion with how come, the sentences become unacceptable for many speakers.

Similarly, in many varieties of English, why questions need do-support, but how come questions do not allow it, as illustrated in (6).

(6)

a) *Why he ate that apple?

b) Why did he eat that apple?

c) How come he ate that apple?

d) *How come did he eat that apple?

Once again, most people’s judgments about (6c) would indicate that how come is incompatible with do-support. It is worth noting that Radford (2018) cited examples of how come constructions where do-support and subject–auxiliary inversion were allowed, such as the following:

(7)

How come does iodine get into the human system of dwellers along the coasts from sea water? (Radford 2018: 217)

(8)

I mean, how come would I be crying? (Radford 2018: 186)

These usages are fairly uncommon, but are nonetheless indicative that there is yet more dialectal variation in uses of how come beyond even the non-finite uses discussed here.

Non-finite how come also does not allow subject–auxiliary inversion. This is not surprising, since the infinitive marker to never inverts with the subject in English. Thus, people who use this construction would not say something like (9):

(2)

How come him to leave the party?

(9)

*How come to him leave the party?

Long-distance readings / What the question is about

In sentences like (10) below, we see that why questions in English can actually ask about an embedded (inner) clause as well as an outer clause:

(10)

Why did John say Mary left?

This can be interpreted either as “What were the reasons why John said this?” or as “According to what John said, what were the reasons why Mary left?”; the former is asking about the outer clause, and the latter is asking about the embedded clause. However, with how come, many native speakers of English can only recover the outer interpretation:

(11)

How come John said Mary left?

Even though it may be possible for some people to interpret this sentence as asking about the reasons for Mary leaving, the outer clause interpretation is certainly heavily favored with how come.

Once again, non-finite how come exhibits exactly the same property. The sentence (12) can only be interpreted as asking about John’s reasons, not Mary’s.

(12)

How come John to say Mary left?

Multiple wh-questions

In English we can have sentences with multiple wh-words, such as:

(13)

Why did John buy what?

Sentences like (13) might seem strange, but an answer to (13) could be that he bought the tomatoes for the luncheon, the water for the birthday party, and so on. However, if we swap out why for how come—either the finite or non-finite version—and change the rest of the sentence structure appropriately, the sentences are unacceptable:

(14)

*How come John ate what?

(15)

*How come John to eat what?

Thus, except for the fact that it is not finite, non-finite how come syntactically behaves like finite how come in most respects.

Historical background

Though its current usage is generally assumed to be confined to Appalachian English, this construction has been found more broadly in literary works from at least the early 1900s until about the late 1930s, as shown in examples (16) and (17), which come from works by writers from Louisiana and Florida respectively:

(16)

She heard Miss Euphemia wonderin' the other day how come the right shoulder of her black silk dress to wear out. (Stuart, 1899)

(17)

That’s how come him to have appetite for a nip o’ pore old Betsy. (Rawlings, 1938/1985)

Notably, it also may have been found throughout the American South even earlier, as the construction appears in transcriptions of interviews with formerly enslaved people, indicating usages in a much more expansive region than its current distribution dating back at least to the mid-1800s:

(18)

And he’d round up the votes, and that’s how come them to kill him.

(19)

Well what I was, what I’m trying to, to find out is, how come him to kill your husband. Was it over politics?

(PBS, 2013)

Recent work on the construction has attempted to pin down its origins, and Johnson (2014) contends that non-finite how come most likely came about as a contraction or reduced form of structures like “How did it come (about) for them to leave”, which in older times might have been “How came it for them to leave”. Under this analysis, dialects that permit non-finite how come have simply preserved a feature of an older form of English, one that most other dialects have lost — indeed, these sorts of structures can be observed numerous times in the works of Shakespeare in the late 16th and early 17th century, as noted in Thiede (2021). However, some linguists disagree with the reduced-clause analysis, and we still don’t have a definitive story describing how how come came about.

Semantic properties

One key semantic difference in the meanings of “why” and “how come” is that why can be used to make a suggestion, as illustrated in (20a), while home come cannot: (20b) takes as given the fact that the the addressee doesn't take out the trash, and is asking why not.

(20)

a) Why don’t you take out the trash?

b) How come you don’t take out the trash?

(Adapted from Conroy 2006: 6)

Conroy (2006) argues that how come is factive. Under a factive analysis of how come in (20b), we presume that the situation has already come to be, and wish to find out what caused it to arise; in contrast, the analogous “why” question in (20a) can be uttered in a situation where it is not clear yet if the addressee will take out the trash. Notably, the reduced-clause analysis mentioned above, which is supported by the existence of non-finite how come, is concordant with this observation, because the potential ancestors of how come were factive and indicated that the described event had already happened. Thus, we would expect non-finite how come to exhibit this property as well.

Page contributed by Ro Malik on 2025-04-17

Please cite this page as: Malik, Ro. 2025. Non-finite how come. Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America. (Available online at http://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/non-finite-how-come. Accessed on YYYY-MM-DD).

References