An ESL textbook editor in Korea sent a question to linguist Mark Liberman, and it turned into one of those beautiful rabbit holes that makes you love language all over again. The question: what's the deal with "What do you say we grab lunch?" versus "What do you say that we grab lunch?" One feels natural. One feels wrong. But why?

The answer involves a corpus database, a very large grammar textbook, and three phrases English speakers use constantly without thinking twice.

The Numbers Don't Lie

The Corpus of Contemporary American English has 1,111 examples of "what do you say we." It has 5 examples of "what do you say that we." That ratio (222 to 1) tells you everything. Native speakers almost never insert "that" there. It's not impossible. It's just not what we do.

If you've ever wondered why one version sounds right and the other sounds slightly off, here's your vindication: the data agrees with your ear.

Grammar Has a Name for This (Of Course It Does)

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) addresses all three of these phrases on page 909. Yes, there's a page number. Yes, linguists have already worked this out.

Take "how come." As in: "How come the fridge is switched off?" CGEL calls it a compound interrogative word functioning as an adjunct in a simple clause. In plain language: "how come" works as a single unit. You can't break it apart. Specifically, you cannot insert "that" after "come." "How come that the fridge is switched off?" doesn't work. The phrase resists modification because it operates as one piece, not two.

"What do you say we" works similarly. The "that" looks grammatically reasonable, but native speakers reject it 222 times out of 223. Some phrases calcify into single units, and trying to expand them feels wrong in a way you can sense but not always explain.

Meanwhile, "How About" Is Doing Everything

CGEL also covers "how about" on that same page 909, and "how about" is the overachiever of suggestion phrases. Its primary job is putting forward a suggestion. But it happily accepts three different grammatical complements:

• A noun phrase: "How about a coffee?"
• A gerund-participial clause: "How about grabbing a coffee?"
• A full tensed declarative clause: "How about we grab a coffee?"

One phrase. Three different grammatical shapes it accepts without complaint. "How about" is the Scrabble player who knows all the obscure two-letter words AND can explain why they're valid. It just works, across contexts.

One More Quirk (There's Always One More)

When "what do you say" takes a noun phrase instead of a clause, it needs "to." You can't say "What do you say another drink?" You have to say "What do you say to another drink?" Drop the clause, pay the preposition toll.

English is full of these tiny invisible rules that native speakers follow perfectly without knowing they exist. They only become visible when someone asks. Usually an ESL learner. Or, in this case, a textbook editor in Korea who noticed something their students were struggling with and decided to dig.

Your Ear Was Right All Along

Here's what's satisfying about corpus data and grammar analysis: it proves that your instincts are usually correct. You probably already knew "What do you say we" sounds better than "What do you say that we." You probably already sensed that "How come that" sounds broken. You were following these rules without a name for them.

The 1,111 versus 5 split is not a rule someone invented and taught. It's a pattern millions of speakers created by just talking naturally. That's the joy of language: finding the system hiding inside what feels like pure instinct.

Now you have the page number. CGEL 909. Use it wisely.

Source: Languagelog