5.7 Formulaic questions

Examples of errors:

1. So what to do if you get a baby without wanting it?
2. You may become pregnant. What to do then?
3. Other members of society receive government support as well. Then why only looking at students?

Three irregular but not infrequent types of questions are formed by whv + infinitive, how + present participle, and what about + present participle e.g.

Why complain all the time?
How about going to the movies?
What about meeting Bill at the airport?

The second type is particularly common in colloquial speech as a means of making a suggestion more casual or an order less abrupt:

Let's go to the movies.
= How about going to the movies?

Mail this letter for me.
How about mailing this letter for me?

The third type is more often used as an abbreviated request for information; the third example above can be expanded as:

What are we going to do about meeting Bill at the airport?

These sentences are irregular in that, unlike other wh- questions, they are formed without an auxiliary verb and no subject is expressed. The structural patterns are productive, allowing negation, passivization, etc., as in the case of normal questions:

Why not complain?
How about not talking so much?

Why be discouraged?
How about being surprised for a change?

They do not extend to all of the question words, however, and combinations with other forms of the verb do not occur:

*How solve the problem?
*Where complain about it?

What to do (cf. (1) and (2)), translating German was tun, is not possible, nor why + present participle (cf. (3)).