Must 怎么 be right after 你 in this sentence: 你怎么知道我的名字

Question

When you ask someone his/her name, you can say: 你叫什么名字

什么 is not right after 你

but when you ask someone how he/she knows your name, you say: 你怎么知道我的名字

Must 怎么 be right after 你 in this sentence? Is 你知道怎么我的名字 also correct? So the structure of this sentence the same as 你叫什么名字

Answer 1

什么 is a modifier for 名字 in 你叫什么名字

怎么 is a modiifer for 知道 in 你怎么知道我的名字

You cannot move 怎么 in the sentence. And you can see that they are actually of different structure.

Answer 2

This is the relevant grammar structure:

Subj. + 怎么 + Verb + Obj.
_{How to do something with "zenme" (see also Expressing "How" with 怎么 (zěnme))}

So

你知道怎么我的名字

is not correct because we need to have a verb after 怎么, but instead we have the noun phrase 我的名字. However, these are correct:

你知道我的名字。 [with no 怎么]
You know my name.

你知道怎么叫我的名字。 [adding 叫 after 怎么]
You know how to say my name.

I don't believe 怎么 can be moved to any other place in 你怎么知道我的名字 to give a grammatical sentence, as there is only one verb, i.e., 知道.

(I should note the existence of 怎么样, which is perhaps irregular in this regard.)

Answer 3

Must 怎么 be right after 你 in this sentence?

No, 怎么 can be placed before or after 你. However, changing the placement of 怎么 would change the meaning of the sentence. It would no longer mean "How do you know my name"

The problem is 怎么 can mean 'how' or ''how come' (used to ask why something has happened, especially when you are surprised by it)

[你怎么][知道我的名字] = [How do you] [Know my name]

[怎么][你知道我的名字] = [How come] [you know my name]

If you want to ask "how do you know my name?", you must put 怎么 after the subject, otherwise [怎么你...] would mean "How come you..."

I always avoid using "怎么" for "How come" and op for the more specific 为什么

Is 你知道怎么我的名字 also correct?

"你知道怎么我的名字" needs a verb between 怎么(how) and 我的名字 (noun).

E.g. "你知道怎么(读)我的名字?"; "你知道怎么(写)我的名字?"

Answer 4

怎么 and 什么 in Chinese are interrogative substitutes.

They work as placeholders. Their position in the sentence depends entirely on what other phrase they are replacing, in order to compose a interrogative sentence.

In 你怎么知道我的名字 the substitute 怎么 replaces a complement of the verb 知道, which would occur before 知道. You can see this if we rewrite the sentence to be affirmative:

我就是知道你的名字 I just know your name (affirmative with same verb, 就是 can answer the "how" question, and occurs before the verb)

Replying to 怎么知道 while maintaining a simple complement + 知道 to illustrate how the substitute works is kinda hard. A less contrived example might be:

我从我朋友那里知道

In 你叫什么名字, the substitute 什么 acts a modifier of 名字. It would work also without 名字, so for the purpose of this argument, let's assume you ask 你叫什么. Then you rewrite the sentence to be affirmative as:

我叫张卫国

Again, the position of the phrase that answers the question is the same as the interrogative substitute.

Yes, there are some exceptions, due to how you can construct question and answers with complex complements, e.g. subordinate clauses, etc. but the rule of thumb is, the interrogative substitute goes in the sentence where its answer would go.

Answer 5

你知道怎么我的名字 is incorrect.

怎麼你(會)知道我的名字 is correct. Add 會 would be more fluent.