Who-What-Where-When-Why-How: 6 Important Interrogatives

(Image from: "https://www.archetypesc.com/journal/who-what-when-where-why-how/")

Have you wondered about Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How? These seem to be the main questions (interrogatives) when one is gathering facts.  However, this appears to be closely related to journalism and story-telling (in general).  In fact, we might even say that these interrogatives are fundamental to humans acquiring knowledge (assuming "knowledge" includes something about "truths" in the world around us).

I've been doing research on "data" for several decades, and this kind of inquiry comes from a long history of trying to understand several core problems, developing theories, and following this area of research (including areas of computer science, information science, terminology science, metadata, data types, knowledge management, context, etc.).

This article focuses upon my interest in: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How.  A follow-up article will discuss turning this kind of information into data (not as obvious/easy as one might think).



By the end of this article, I hope you have a stronger appreciation of something so every-day-simple (these 6 interrogatives), yet so fundamental to our thinking, and they span every language (even Australian aboriginal and Native American languages): statements, stories, descriptions, facts, and knowledge all have a connection with these 6 interrogatives.

A Short Digression on Metadata

I need to take a digression on "metadata", a topic I've been doing research on for two decades.  The idea of "metadata" is both simple/elegant ("descriptive data about an object") and rich (ah, there are many kinds of descriptive data).  For example, your old-style library card catalog has filled with metadata - a card or two or three for each book in the library.  This description data includes things the like Title of the book, the Subject of the book (which is not the same as the catalog number or index), and the Author.  Those elements of data:

{
    Title: The Art of Electronics;
    Subject: electronics, science, physics;
    Author: Paul Horowitz, Winfield Hill;
}

are all descriptive data.  An important feature of metadata is that it is descriptive data about something, i.e., there is a descriptive relation between the metadata and the object(s) it describes.  (A side note: metadata can be especially interesting when the same metadata describes more than one object - I'll save that for a separate post).  In this case here, the metadata describes a college text book on electronics (I had the earlier version of this, called Basic Electronics, in college - a very excellent book).

For books (and more generally "media" or "content" or "resources"), the above kind of metadata in a card catalog entry has more information, such as the Publish Date, Copyright Date, Number Of Pages, Publisher, and so on.  This kind of data has several related standards and specifications, such as DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative), which produced the Dublin Core standard for metadata about "resources", like books and digital content.

The PBS Kids Series on "Jakers! The Adventures of Piggley Winks"

Imagine my delight in seeing a children's television show whose educational goal is to teach about interrogatives!  Jakers! is a wonderful show, with present day United States cultural framing with flashbacks to Ireland in the 1950s - the culture of farming and tiny villages.   I'd say the target age group might be 4-9 year-olds.  Every show ended with an educational lesson on the Who, What, Where, and When of the story.

Interrogatives Are Fundamental To Journalism

I'm sure you've heard of the fundamentals of a good newspaper story: tell about the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How.  A story isn't complete without it.  Imagine the hypothetical news story:

"There was an accident (What) on the Staten Island Ferry (Where) today (When) when a bus crashed into the ferry (How)"

The above story is missing its Why element, incomplete on the Where element (did the accident happen when docked? or in open water in New York Harbor?), and incomplete on the How element (assuming the accident happened in open water, what was a bus doing in the middle of New York Harbor?).

Like many complex news stories, we don't have all the facts (the descriptive elements) immediately, and it might take a while to understand more about the event: e.g., the accident occurred in open water, and the explanation for a bus being in the water was: it was an old bus that was donated to be sunk to create an artificial reef.  That might satisfy describing the first story, but might also lead to the next one: detailing the non-sinking of the bus, which hit the ferry (cause: the bus windows were shut and the bus' passenger compartment was filled with air, unexpectedly causing the bus float); and that story might lead to the next one: the numbskulls responsible for not opening the bus's doors and windows when pushing overboard (the Who interrogative of this follow-up story).

As background information, there is a good Wikipedia article on the journalism interrogatives, which includes more information:

• What happened?
• Who was involved?
• Where did it take place?
• When did it take place?
• Why did that happen?
• How did it happen?

These core interrogatives are sometimes called "W5H" or "W5H1", or "W6" (the 6th W is in "hoW"), and "the 5 W's" (the How is excluded).

To expand upon the topic, one can further specialize/detail the W6 in include other interrogatives (variants and combinations of the original 6), and there is some question whether How can be subsumed by What, Where, and When (in my opinion: No, because How also includes other pragmatics), meanwhile some believe they should be expanded to include In What Way, By What Means, With What, and such - see the Wikipedia reference above for more information and fundamentals of rhetoric.

Adding further complexity, many times there isn't just a single answer to an interrogative, such as the book above: When was it copyrighted? When was it published?  Who authored the book?  Who published the book?  And even some of those questions have multiple answers (there are two authors in the example of "The Art of Electronics").

Why Are These Interrogatives (Requests for Information) Worth Studying?

I believe these interrogatives are fundamental to language.  To be precise, I am distinguishing between the grammatical notion of an interrogative (whether there is a grammatical sentence form to ask a question) from the request for information (which still might exist in a language, regardless of its inability to ask questions).  An example of such a request is in For the Love of Language: An Introduction to Linguistics, By Kate Burridge, Tonya N. Stebbins, chapter 9:

The universality of these sentence types - implications 

Think how often in a day you are asked a direct question, either face to face or perhaps in some sort of survey. Interrogatives were once thought to be universal, but it is now clear this is not the case. Bill McGregor, for example, has described how the Aboriginal language Gooniyandi (spoken in the Fitzroy Crossing area of Western Australia) has no grammatically distinct class of interrogative. This doesn't mean speakers aren’t able to ask questions, but they go about this in a very different way. Requests for information don't differ grammatically from statements. So speakers provide information but leave something unspecified in the expectation that the hearer might respond to and fill in the blank. Statements are also made with the desire that they will trigger some sort of agreement or disagreement on the part of the hearer. 

Malngaya-nhingi       giddbiyi    ngoonyiya
Malngaya from         he went     somewhere to
'From Malngaya he went somewhere' 

Diana Eades has also discussed various indirect ways speakers of Aboriginal English have for seeking information - they have a similar strategy of making a statement in the hopes that a hearer in the know will (immediately or at a later time) confirm or comment on the information. 

The educational implications of this are significant, since in schools the main method of extracting information out of children is by asking direct questions. Institutions such as the law and the media also consider direct questions to be the most effective way of eliciting information. But what if a person's first language has nothing that corresponds grammatically to an interrogative? These are important differences between languages and they have serious consequences in all sorts of areas of communication, as we go on to discuss in Chapters 13 and 14.

In other words, when I speak about interrogatives, I am speaking about requests for information, not the grammatical sentence type.

Also, these interrogatives are non-polar in that Yes-No responses aren't answers to the question (see the Wikipedia link, and also see discussion of Yes-No polar interrogatives).

These interrogatives are pervasive and, regardless of grammatical structure, they are fundamental to description.

Decomposing the W6 Interrogatives

It's worth describing the W6 interrogatives more precisely:

• Who: An interrogative about actors and. secondarily, the roles they play.  Example: In the electronics book above, there are at least two kinds of actors: the author, and the publisher (two different roles), and one of those roles itself (author) has two actors.
• Where: An interrogative about the spatial extent (the location).  Example: The spatial extent of the ferry accident is New York Harbor.
• When: An interrogative about the temporal extent (the time, date, etc.).  Example: A news story might identify a time (crash occurred at 17:17), the day (July 4, 1776), an emperor's era (Japanese calendar), a broader period (The Renaissance), a geological era (Mesozoic).
• What: An interrogative about tying Who-Where-When descriptors to action and object taxonomies.  Example: "We went skiiing in Denver over the holiday".  The "skiing" ties the Who, Where, and When in this sentence.  The notion of "to ski" fits in a taxonomy of actions, of the variety human actions, of the variety human activities, of the variety recreational activities, of the variety of winter recreational activities.  Of course, this isn't the only taxonomy, as one could arrive at "skiing" via a Things-To-Do-In-Denver taxonomy.
• Why: An interrogative about causality.  Example: The bus floated and crashed into the ferry. Why? Because some numbskulls didn't open the windows and doors of the bus.
• How: An interrogative about pragmatics of the Why and other descriptors. For example, the numbskulls used a crane to pick up the bus off the barge and drop it in the water, and they were worried that if the bus started filling with water, it would topple the crane; after they detached the floating bus from the crane, they realized they had no way to open up the bus's doors and windows to cause it to sink, so it floated away and crashed into the Staten Island ferry.

Even aboriginal languages have most/all of these interrogatives.  (However, I'm sure aboriginals had more knowledge than our numbskulls about floating/sinking boats.)

As described above, they can be further detailed and specialized (who-author vs. who-publisher).

What I find interesting is that these interrogatives are commonplace across culture and language. The orator Hermagoras of Temnos in first century BCE had already identified seven (Who, What, When, Where, Why, In-What-Way, By-What-Means).  In Western Culture, these were surely passed down and refined, as it became important in confessions to describe not just the sin, but how it came about (see Wikipedia article on W5):

The question form was taken up again in the 12th century by Thierry de Chartres and John of Salisbury. To administer suitable penance to sinners, the 21st canon of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) enjoined confessors to investigate both sins and the circumstances of the sins. The question form was popular for guiding confessors, and it appeared in several different forms: 

Quis, quid, ubi, per quos, quoties, cur, quomodo, quando.
Quis, quid, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quomodo, quando.
Quis, quid, ubi, cum quo, quotiens, cur, quomodo, quando.
Quid, quis, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quomodo, quando.
Quid, ubi, quare, quantum, conditio, quomodo, quando: adiuncto quoties. 

[...] In the 16th century, Thomas Wilson wrote in English verse: 

Who, what, and where, by what helpe, and by whose:
Why, how, and when, doe many things disclose. 

[and further memorialized by] Rudyard Kipling in his "Just So Stories" (1902), in which a poem accompanying the tale of "The Elephant's Child" opens with: 

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who. 

By 1917, the "Five Ws" were being taught in high-school journalism classes,[20] and by 1940, the tendency of journalists to address all of the "Five Ws" within the lead paragraph of an article was being characterized as old-fashioned and fallacious: "The old-fashioned lead of the five Ws and the H, crystallized largely by Pulitzer's "new journalism" and sanctified by the schools, is widely giving way to the much more supple and interesting feature lead, even on straight news stories. All of you know about — and I hope all of you admit the fallacy of — the doctrine of the five Ws in the first sentence of the newspaper story."

Of course, interrogatives are enshrined in the comedy of Abbott and Costello's Who's On First, still probably the funniest moment ever on TV, and here is an excerpt where Costello's believes he's got the names of the players, including one named Naturally:

Abbott: You throw the ball to first base.
Costello: Then who gets it?
Abbott: Naturally.
Costello: Naturally.
Abbott: Now you've got it.
Costello: I throw the ball to Naturally.
Abbott: You don't! You throw it to Who!
Costello: Naturally.
Abbott: Well, that's it—say it that way.
Costello: That's what I said.
Abbott: You did not.
Costello: I said I throw the ball to Naturally.
Abbott: You don't! You throw it to Who!
Costello: Naturally.

My Hypothesis: W6 Interrogatives are Fundamental to Language (at least in the past 2000 years)

With the above information, one might see how the W6 interrogatives became fundamental to Western culture.  But what about elsewhere in the world? I believe it is dependent upon global communication with the target culture. So while China's present journalists use this kind of descriptive technique (and, thus, Chinese citizens understand it and use it too in common conversation), I'm curious about that aspect of world history (China and elsewhere outside Western culture), and maybe a reader has some pointers.  Still, Australian aboriginal language and Native American language has most/all of these interrogatives.

So here's my hunch ... many interrogatives came inescapably from linguistic frameworks.  Examples:

• Who: Humans are speaking about other humans and one needs to reference other actors and distinguish among actors.  At some point, there are unknown actors in a linguistic expression. Thus, the notion of Who arises.
• Where: Humans travel and, just like distinguishing among actors, humans needed to distinguish between Here, There, and Elsewhere. Thus, the notion of Where arises.
• When: Humans experience and anticipate day, night, and the changes in between.  Likewise, many/most humans experienced and anticipated changes in the seasons.  Thus, the notion of When arises.
• What: Even without the encyclopedic knowledge available today, communities of humans had agreement on animal types, things that were dangerous or not, and kinds of foods to eat (just to name a few).  So there was some notion of "he killed a deer", where "killing" and "deer" are a part of that community's common taxonomies.  Also, What provides the connecting glue among Who, Where, When, actions, objects, etc..
• Why: Explanation is different than description: explanation seeks to attribute some causality. Using our numbskulls-reef-bus-ferry-accident scenario, "The bus floated and crashed into the ferry. Why? Because some numbskulls didn't open the windows and doors of the bus.".  So when have we, as humans, started explaining things?  A long time ago (10th-11th centuries BCE), the Hebrew bible was started, which explained things right with the very first words of Genesis: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. [...]".  Now add in the ancient astronomers, including Ptolemy (first century CE), and there are now causal explanations about the visibility and movement of celestial objects. Ditto for causal explanations of other objects, and the sciences grew with better and more precise explanations.
• How: This describes the pragmatics that follow from the Why: there can't be an description of a How without a framework (or hypothesis) or some kinda Why.  Without a nominal or hypothetical Why, there can't be a How, e.g., without the "flux capacitor" as the essential element that made the time machine work (the Why) in the movie Back to the Future, the rest of the storytelling in the movie would have no How - a What description Yes, but not a How. which was essential for plot and dramatic purposes.

In summary, I've presented the 6 Interrogatives in order of motivation and discover (in my thinking): Who and Where were first, then When, and then What followed.  Later on, in the Age Of Explanation (I just made that up!), both Why and How followed.

I'm happy to hear corrections, alternate theories, updates, references, and such, so let me know.