English How Come Construction: A Double Life *

Abstract The expression how come is a lot similar to why in its usage as well as in the meaning, but displays quite unpredictable properties. There have been several attempts to deal with the construction involving how come, but they all seem to be not satisfactory enough when considering its wider variations we find in actual uses. In this paper, we try to look into its grammatical properties together with detailed corpus search and then provide a constructionbased approach that can deal with its idiosyncrasies as well as regularities