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I was reading an article about the use of "why" as an adverb. I thought about what other function the word can have and came to the reasoning that it can be a conjunction joining clauses. I looked up a number of dictionaries:

Merriam-Webster Dictionary(yes, conjunction)
why
conjunction
2 : for which : on account of which
know the reason why you did it

American-Heritage Dictionary (yes, conjunction)
why
conj. 1. The reason, cause, or purpose for which:
I know why you left.

Random House Kernerman Webster's Dictionary (yes, conjunction)
conj.
2. for what cause or reason: I don't know why he left.
3. for which; on account of which (usu. after reason to introduce a relative clause): the reason why she refused to go.
4. the reason for which: That is why he returned.

Cambridge Dictionary (yes, conjunction)
conjunction, adverb [not gradable]
for what reason:
She’ll ask why you don’t have your homework.

Oxford Living Dictionaries (conjunction not mentioned, listed as "relative adverb")
 relative adverb

1(with reference to a reason) on account of which; for which.
‘the reason why flu jabs need repeating every year is that the virus changes’
1.1 The reason for which.
‘each has faced similar hardships, and perhaps that is why they are friends’

Collins Dictionary (doesn't mention conjunction, lists is as "pronoun")
pron
for or because of which: there is no reason why he shouldn't come.

Yet on the Collins Learner's Dictionary it lists it both as pronoun and conjunction
2. conjunction You use why at the beginning of a clause in which you talk about the reasons for something.

  • He still could not throw any further light on why the elevator could have become jammed.

  • Experts wonder why the U.S. government is not taking similarly strong actions against AIDS in this country.

  • I can't understand why they don't want us.

3.pronoun You use why to introduce a relative clause after the word 'reason'.

  • There's a reason why women don't read this stuff; it's not funny.
  • Unless you're ill, there's no reason why you can't get those 15 minutes of walking in daily.

So in all examples where Collins lists it as a pronoun we have "why" coming directly after the word "reason". Oxford Living Dictionaries doesn't list it as a pronoun, but a "relative adverb".

I didn't find "why" anywhere in the Wikipedia Conjunction article, but did find it in the Wikipedia Conjunctive adverb article.

I'm wondering why in these two particular dictionaries (Collins and Oxford Living Dictionaries) we don't find "why" listed as conjunctions? Are they not viewed as such in modern grammar?

Also, I've been warned in the past not to place my trust in dictionaries when recognising word categories or functions, which is another reason why I'm asking this.

Zebrafish
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    Are other question words considered some kind of conjunctions? I'd trust a common thread among published dictionaries over Wikipedia. – Mitch Nov 27 '18 at 03:11
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    Why is a just a rather odd wh-word. Its distribution is very limited -- it can only have the word reason as its antecedent, and since it's never the subject it's always deletable. Consequently it behaves strangely, as you and others point out. – John Lawler Nov 27 '18 at 03:39
  • @Mitch Yes me too. But I've been warned against trusting dictionaries when identifying words. "Where" seems to follow the same pattern, that is, the same dictionaries list it as conjunction, with OLO listing it as "relative adverb", Collins listing it as pronoun but not conjunction, however in its Learner's dictionary lists it as conjunction also. "How" follows exactly the same pattern among these dictionaries, except in Collins it only lists it as adv. and n., not pronoun. However it's learner's version says "how" is a conjunction in "It's funny how I never seem to get a thing done". – Zebrafish Nov 27 '18 at 03:41
  • I would think "trusting dictionaries" is not relevant here at all. – Kris Nov 27 '18 at 06:45
  • Not finding something is not a proof of its incorrectness. The question is based on inadequate research. – Kris Nov 27 '18 at 06:53
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    @JohnLawler: That is odd that "reason" is the only common word used in this construction; I hadn't realized that before. It seems that "the cause why" is also (but only rarely) used. – herisson Nov 27 '18 at 08:57
  • @Kris What extra research should I have included in this question? Searching for "Is why a conjunction?" leads to results about why 'some particular word' is a conjunction. One relevant result is from answers.com, which I didn't include because I don't think it's a very trusted source. Here it just says it can be a conjunction. In the past I've used dictionaries as support (not proof) for a word being adj., pronoun etc, and have been met with the response that serious grammarians and linguists don't use dictionaries for this task, suggesting that trusting dictionaries IS relevant here. – Zebrafish Nov 27 '18 at 09:53
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    @Zebrafish - I think you're asking the wrong question. Why is a wh-word, and they have their own category. They sometimes act like conjunctions do, but so do many other words. Asking about the Part of Speech of some grammatical word is a waste of time, because the Parts of Speech were designed for describing inflected languages, and English is uninflected, which means there are a lot of little words lying around that don't have meanings or general purposes, but rather fit specifically in some construction to make it work. Wh-words are one such group of words. – John Lawler Nov 27 '18 at 17:41
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    @JohnLawler "asking about the Part of Speech of some grammatical word is a waste of time". I mostly agree. I often think I'm stupid for pondering this stuff. But I've had discussions with people on this site who are very convinced that a particular word is X and not Y based on modern grammar, and I've found myself questioning them, citing various sources. It's clear that for many people this perhaps seemingly pedantic categorisation of words is important. In fact I can even imagine tests asking something of the sort, where your prospect of success depends on knowing what "type" the word is. – Zebrafish Nov 28 '18 at 06:29
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    @Zebrafish Nothing can be more illogical than that. Certain words (in certain contexts) could, and ought to be defined in certain roles. Else you can't make sense of anything said or written at all. That doesn't mean every word should unconditionally have a POS cast in stone for it. Read a word as a noun in a sentence and it makes sense, read the same sentence with the word as a verb and it no longer makes sense, or worse, it works in an entirely different way and means something else altogether. Right? – Kris Nov 28 '18 at 07:45
  • meta: Searching for "Is why a conjunction?" is not the end of research. See the comments, and hopefully, forthcoming answers, if any. – Kris Nov 28 '18 at 07:48
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    @Kris "Searching for 'Is why a conjunction?' is not the end of research." I don't remember ever saying that one string search was the end of my research, nor does my question indicate that. My question contains 7 links to dictionary entries, including a learner's dictionary, and two Wikipedia articles. I also don't remember claiming that a word should have only one function "cast in stone". I asked this question with reference to the fact that two respected dictionaries did not list "why" as a conjunction, but rather as a "pronoun" and "relative adverb". I don't know why this is. – Zebrafish Nov 28 '18 at 09:31
  • https://twitter.com/@OxfordWords ; https://twitter.com/collinsdict – Kris Nov 28 '18 at 10:37
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    Contrary to AHD, some consider the why in "I know why you left" an adverb of type wh- (referring to the verb left). That's one way to look at it, rather than as a subordinating conjuntion. I think this is exactly the same, too, with any other wh- word: how, when, where, Not so with whether, while. It depends on how the dictionary compilers go about parsing it. – Kris Nov 28 '18 at 11:03
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    The difference between an adverb and a subordinating conjunction is not very substantial. Most subordinating conjunctions introduce adverbial clauses and many if not most can also be used as adverbs with the same sense, without a clause (but often presupposing one). That's the issue here -- POS are important in a Big Bag of Words kind of grammar, where all you see is words and tags on them. But that's not how English works -- English is all phrases and clauses acting as adverbs or nouns or adjectives or verbs -- so POS gets confused between the clause and its head word. – John Lawler Nov 28 '18 at 16:03
  • Basically, "conjunction" is the term used when some expert gets pist about not knowing what else to call it. – Hot Licks May 01 '19 at 16:00

2 Answers2

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The word why can obviously be used as a conjunction, as your examples clearly indicate.

The problem is with the dictionaries.

To see why, consider this Wikipedia article on Natural Language Processing. In the original “rules based” approach to language processing, the analysis of a speech fragment depended on the fragment conforming to an expression that could be generated from a grammar. The association of a given word with a part of speech would therefore determine the expressions that could be generated.

However, the “rules based” approach has been largely superseded by the “statistical” approach, partly because the rules themselves became complex and unwieldy.

But my real point is this: Dictionaries are written by human beings with a fundamentaly limited rules-based approach to language processing. As the human user attempts to apply the dictionary rules (parts of speech, etc.), he or she inevitably runs up against the same problems as the computer programmer trying to implement similar rules in their code. The rules printed in the dictionary are simply not powerful enough to deal with the range of expressions found in real life.

From the statistical point of view, why is found in multiple roles. However, the dictionary writer, aiming at readability instead of completeness, inevitably has to leave some of these out.

It is worth noting that even a simple natural language processing program like Siri (or the Office Online spelling assistant) has already analyzed more sentences than you or I could read in a thousand lifetimes. Their “dictionaries” and “grammar manuals” go far beyond what can be found in Collins or the Oxford.

So in practice, the occurrence of why in the role of a conjunction means that the part-of-speech attribute conjunction can be applied to the word why.

I suppose we could go further and argue about whether the assignment of an attribute means that something actually “is” something, with a digression into deep epistimology, social constructions of meaning, and that kind of thing. However, if we accept that the statistical concept of natural language processing has been validated through its practical application, even for the sake of argument, then we should be willing to accept the assignment of attributes by the programs that have analyzed the largest number of examples, your own examples counting among them.

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    Your argument seems to be that with a large enough corpus any word can be found in any grammatical role, so parts of speech have no meaning? – Stuart F Mar 29 '24 at 15:37
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In the following sentence, why might seem to be a subordinating conjunction, which simply joins two clauses:

I don't know why he got angry.

But according to the Oxford Languages, it's an interrogative adverb, which here means for what reason.

Now, consider the following:

I don't know the reason why he got angry.

In this sentence, why (= for which) is a relative adverb, and why he got angry is a relative/an adjective clause modifying the noun reason. Where, when, and why modify the verb, so they are relative adverbs, not relative pronouns:

  • That was the place. + We ate in that place. = That was (the place) where we ate. "In that place" (= there) is an adverb giving information about where it happened.
  • That was the time. + We met at that time. = That was (the time) when we met. "At that time" (= then) is an adverb giving information about when it happened.
  • That was the reason. + He got angry for that reason. = That was (the reason) why he got angry. "For that reason" (= therefore) is an adverb giving information about why it happened.

See also

  • Complete English Grammar Rules: relative adverbs
  • John Eastwood, Oxford Learner's Grammar - Grammar Finder, entry 271: relative adverbs
  • Bas Aarts, Oxford Modern English Grammar, p. 197: wh relative clauses
Mori
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    There are ongoing debates about the classification of words occupying unconventional slots as the result of deletions of various kinds, and associated usages (intransitive prepositions, for instance). John Lawler classes why here as a relative pronoun. – Edwin Ashworth Dec 24 '23 at 14:04
  • I don't know what Swan's logic is but surely it's incorrect to call it an informal version of "I don't know the reason why he got angry." We find in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well "But never hope to know why I should marry her." And he also uses "ask why". So if it's an informal/non-standard form, it's one that was in Shakespeare and has persisted over 400 years; at what point is such a thing elevated to correct grammar? – Stuart F Dec 24 '23 at 14:16
  • '[W]hy is a rather special relative pronoun. Indeed, it's a pronoun that can only refer to one word: reason. – Edwin Ashworth Dec 24 '23 at 14:37
  • @EdwinAshworth: "John Lawler classes why here as a relative pronoun." I wonder what noun it replaces. It makes sense to call it an adverb as it replaces the adverb "for that reason" or "hence", which modifies the verb. – Mori Dec 24 '23 at 14:43
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    @EdwinAshworth: "it's a pronoun that can only refer to one word: reason" A noun and pronoun that are used together!? As far as I know, a pronoun replaces a noun to avoid repetitiveness. – Mori Dec 24 '23 at 14:56
  • That's the pronoun's principal function (avoiding tediously repeating a noun). But consider 'dummy it' ('It's raining') etc, 'one' (one never knows who's listening'), and dislocations (Mary and Peter, they went to the store). Not its only function. – Edwin Ashworth Dec 24 '23 at 19:14
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    @Mori Your two examples are not the same construction. They mean the same thing merely because the verb know can take an interrogative clause or an NP. Cf. I wonder why he got angry vs. *I wonder the reason why he got angry. – JK2 Mar 31 '24 at 04:44
  • @JK2: That's because wonder already means want to know. – Mori Mar 31 '24 at 06:02
  • @Mori What do you mean "That's because..."? Even though wonder can be rephrased as "want to know", unlike know, it doesn't take an NP. You can say I want to know the reason why he got angry but you can't say I wonder the reason why he got angry. – JK2 Mar 31 '24 at 06:14
  • @JK2: Sorry my comment wasn't clear! "you can't say I wonder the reason why he got angry" That's because, as I said, wonder means want to know, and why here means the reason why. (source: Oxford Languages) The word reason is clearly implied when you don't write it. Just updated my answer. – Mori Mar 31 '24 at 12:44