Metacommunicative-why fragments as probes into the grammar of the speech act layer

The English lexical item why can be used metacommunicatively in response to a previous question act. In these cases, its meaning is similar to “Why are you (the original questioner) asking me (the original addressee) that question?” This is also true of why ’s counterparts in a range of other languages. We demonstrate how metacommunicative, or meta, why ’s use and meaning is similar to and different from the paraphrase above, proposing a modal-driven ontology for why , and explore how different constructions involving meta-why are derived. We argue that meta-why is derived by eliding a question act, a syntactic object larger than a proposition


Introduction
The syntax-discourse interface is a vital and vibrant focal point for linguistic study in terms of theory, acquisition, cognition and typology.Understanding interfaces, however, requires an understanding of the reach and extent of the two modules that are interacting.The speech act 1 syntax enterprise of the 21st century (inspired by Ross's 1970 work) has advanced the claim that there are syntactic projections concerned with the expression of information about interlocutors and discourse structure (Speas & Tenny 2003;Hill 2007a;b;2013;Krifka 2014;2021;Wiltschko & Heim 2016;Woods 2016;2021 inter alia) rather than leaving these types of information to fall solely within the purview of pragmatics or sociolinguistics.This article will support the speech act syntax enterprise and the postulation of speech act-specific syntactic projections by using the following data point 2 as a springboard: (1) A.
Is Sally here?B.
Why? [⋍ why are you asking me that?] This data point was previously addressed by Ginzburg (2012) using Type Theory with Records (Cooper 2005;2011) and treated as a fragmentary utterance.We will adopt Ginzburg's terms in referring to whys like those in (1) metacommunicative uses of why (henceforth meta-why).Metawhy contrasts with non-metacommunicative fragmentary uses of why like those in (2): (2) A.
Sally built a wall.B.
Why? [= for what reason did she build a wall?]B′.Why? [= for what purpose did she build a wall?] Where fragmentary why in (2) targets the reason for the overt proposition in the preceding utterance, meta-why appears to target the reason for making the preceding speech act, specifically a question, itself.Ginzburg (2012: 313) also claims that they differ intonationally, with a simple rise contour on meta-why and a rise-fall tune on on reason-and purpose-why.Ginzburg (2012) also notes that the kinds of discourse contexts in which meta-why is used are many and varied.It may be used when the answer to the preceding question is complex and the addressee wants to diagnose which part is relevant to the speaker's conversational needs; when the addressee does not know the answer but with more information could direct the speaker to the answer; or when the addressee is suspicious of the speaker's motives.He analyses meta-why as a non-sentential utterance separate from other types of fragmentary why and claims that it encodes particular properties, leading to the above range of interpretations.
In this paper, we do not treat meta-why as a non-sentential utterance but rather claim that it is the result of ellipsis applied to a larger syntactic structure. 3The basis for our argument is that meta-why is restricted by both semantic and syntactic properties of the utterance.Moreover, we provide novel data demonstrating that it can co-occur with overt material and demonstrate how this is evidence that even bare meta-why contains silent clausal structure.We also briefly consider languages in which their equivalent of meta-why takes a different lexical form and is not subject to the same syntactic restrictions, analysing these kinds of utterances as truly nonsentential.
The paper is structured as follows.In Section 2, we describe the meaning and usage conditions of meta-why with respect to discourse and syntactic factors and flesh out the differences between meta-why and other instances of why, sketching a modal-driven ontology.In Section 3 we demonstrate that meta-why-fragments result from a process of ellipsis and that this process is very similar to why-stripping.In Section 4 we show that the antecedent for ellipsis is not a typical why-question akin to "Why are you asking me this?", and in Section 5 we adopt modern speech act theory to analyse meta-why utterances as the ellipsis of an illocutionary act phrase, a discourse-related projection that takes ForceP (the proposition) as its complement.Section 6 concludes.

Meaning and usage conditions 2.1 Usage restrictions: clause types and force
Meta-why-fragments may only appear after interrogatively-typed information-seeking questions.Accordingly, meta-why is infelicitous if it follows questions that are neither interrogativelytyped nor information-seeking.
( It is also excluded from the turn following a declarative: 7 4 Some informants indicate that they can get a metacommunicative reading for why following an example like (5).For example, an anonymous reviewer suggests that it would be acceptable if the child has been behaving well lately, but the mother has fallen into the habit of uttering such a question.We must assume that a rhetorical question is only interpreted as such if the speaker expects that both speaker and addressee share the same conversational background for the question.If for some reason the intentions of the speaker and the interpretation of the addressee do not align-as in the reviewer's context above-then a metacommunicative effect may obtain, but only because the question is now not interpreted as rhetorical by the addressee.For more on the importance of shared conversational backgrounds and the importance of all interlocutors recognising whether the question is open or not, see Sections 2.2.2 and 5.3.

5
Thanks to Maria-Margarita Makri for the Greek data.

6
In fact, a fragment why question seems to be excluded as a response to any form of exclamative.Thanks to William van der Wurff for drawing this point out, which we leave for future research.

7
We do not deal with imperatives here as the data is a little trickier and we do not have the space to do it justice.Suffice it to say that we think that why-fragments following imperatives do not target the making of the speech act, but rather why the addressee should cause the content of the imperative to be the case.Thanks to Hazel Pearson for giving us food for thought here.Our first core observation is therefore as follows: neither clause-type alone nor perlocutionary force in the sense of Austin (1962) are useful indicators of the distribution of meta-why, as both overgenerate.
A second observation, already illustrated in ( 9), is that meta-why can only target matrix questions.In the event that the only question in the preceding utterance is embedded, a fragment-why question is interpreted as a reason-or purpose-why over the matrix predicate.
The why-fragment in (10) asks for a reason for the matrix proposition, in (11) it asks for the reason or purpose behind the request to bring a tennis racket to a party, and in ( 12) it asks for a reason why the addressee should do as the speaker (indirectly) requests (see Section 2.2.2 for more on the interaction between modals and why): Having argued that meta-why only targets root information-seeking questions, the next section investigates in more detail the usage properties of meta-why.It also seeks to distinguish it from reason-/purpose-why with reference to the factors that determine what constitutes an appropriate answer to each type of why.

Speakers and addressees
Meta-why's distribution in discourse is restricted in terms of the content it can access and the interlocutors who may deploy it.As noted by Ginzburg (2012: 313), only the addressee of the relevant question can use meta-why: (13) Context: A courtroom.Lawyer, to defendant: Were you wearing blue on the night of 13th April?Judge, to lawyer: #Why?[intended ⋍ why are you asking him that?] 8 A fragment why with a similar effect to meta-why can occur after declaratives: (i) Context: a dinner party.After eating, your notoriously embarrassing dad announces: Dad: Right, I'm off to the toilet now.You: Whyyy?
We argue that this is a different case of fragment why as it requires a shared cultural norm to be subverted, an exaggerated rising intonation contour, and may be used by a third-party to the conversation, which is not the case with meta-why.Moreover, it seems to quantify over the affect of the addressee towards the speaker rather than the speaker's original speech act; its interpretation is something like "Why are you so embarrassing?"rather than straightforwardly "Why are you telling me/us this?".We won't go into further details as to this use of meta-why here, but thank James Griffiths (p.c.) for the example.Woods and Vicente Glossa: a journal of general linguistics DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.1169 However, we argue that the addressee of the original question may be understood as slightly broader than the single person to whom the question is addressed.George Tsoulas (p.c.) suggests that the following scenario, minimally different from (13), is in fact felicitous: (14) Prosecution lawyer, to defendant: Were you wearing blue on the night of 13th April?Defence lawyer: Why?
As the defence lawyer has the right to speak on behalf of the defendant, she is effectively the addressee of the prosecution lawyer's question too.
We further observe that the addressee of the original question need not be one unique individual, as meta-why is fine in contexts where the original question is addressed to a group, as long as the utterer of meta-why can plausibly be understood to be an addressee of the original question.
(15) Cookery teacher: How many eggs should I add to the cake?Class member: Why? [⋍ why are you asking us that?] Further to this, meta-why also cannot be used by the original questioner to induce the addressee to make explicit the questioner's own motivations (see also In ( 18), why appears to be requesting a reason for the teacher's question.Though this seems to be precisely the meaning of meta-why, we have already seen that meta-why differs from reasonand purpose-why.We resketch the differences between reason-and purpose-why in ( To understand why this is, we will now investigate how different types of why differ based on the information that informs their possible answers, ultimately drawing an analogy between different types of why and different modal flavours.Koura (1988) distinguishes between a why whose answer pertains to the achievement of an endpoint (purpose-why) and a why whose answer depends on natural laws and how they determine causal relationships to explain a connection between the explanandum and the explanation (reason-why).Bromberger (1992) also invokes natural law as a condition that defines possible answers to reason-why questions.This characterisation of different types of why recalls a Kratzerian approach to modality (Kratzer 1981;1991;2012), wherein modals are distinguished by two contextual factors.This is summarised by Katz et al. (2012: 489) as follows:

A brief ontology of why
[…] the modal base, which determines the possibilities that are relevant in the current context, and the ordering source, which provides a set of propositions encoding the priorities among these possibilities.The ordering source induces a "goodness" ordering on worlds, and this ordering serves as the basis for interpreting [modal] sentences.To flesh out the analogy: just as teleological modals and deontic modals are distinguished by their ordering sources (the performance of actions favourable to some outcome versus adherence to some set of laws), so answers to purpose-and reason-why are distinguished by similar sets of determining factors-the actions that are favourable to reaching a given outcome versus the laws that dictate whether an event or state will obtain in some context.
Interestingly, when these types of why query propositions that contain modals, the explanandumthat which requires explanation-shifts from the outcome/event/state to target the modal's ordering source.This is illustrated in the reason-why9 examples in ( 21)-( 22).Moreover, when the premises that underpin the modal ordering source are overt, as in ( 23), the explanandum shifts again to the legitimacy of the ordering source: ( We can therefore observe that the explanandum of a meta-why question is always the premise(s) that motivate the previous speaker's question, which implies that no matter how much context the previous speaker has given for their question, the utterer of meta-why believes that there is some information that still has not been shared with them.It also suggests that meta-why outscopes modality, unlike reason-and purpose-whys.
Moreover, answers to meta-why questions are not defined by epistemic factors in general, such as stereotypical expectations as to why any speaker would ask some given question, but they specifically target information that only that original questioner could possibly provide, as it pertains to their motivations and intentions within the discourse-information that Ginzburg (2012: 300-301)  In this case, the defence lawyer's meta-why is considered insincere as the prosecution lawyer's reasons for asking the question have already been established and accepted by all interlocutors (namely relationship of the shirt colour to the case and the role of the prosecution lawyer in the context), so the meta-why question itself is rejected rather than answered.
(28) Context: parents talking to their truculent child.Parent 1: Did you go out with Jay last night?Child: Why? Parent 2: Because we're just concerned for your wellbeing.
In this case, the parents are effectively acting as one speaker as they share the exact same intentions with respect to the question at issue.
We therefore conclude that meta-why targets the private knowledge and intentions of the original speaker and that that knowledge must not be already shared between the speaker and the addressee.As an extension of that, answers to meta-why cannot be solely defined by any other set of factors, such as circumstance, natural law or stereotypical expectation.

Lexical realisations of different whys
We also find empirical motivation for a distinction between reason-and purpose-why on the one hand, and meta-why on the other, in languages that have different lexical items for reasonand purpose-why.That said, we see some ways in which meta-and reason-why are similar and distinguished from purpose-why.Russian a chto is not the same type of element as meta-why as it can be used metacommunicatively in response to declaratives (just like English And (what)?/So (what)?) and does not appear to be sentential, as we will show in Section 5.2.We will otherwise leave elements like a chto for future work.Ginzburg (2012: 313) also notes that in Hebrew and German, languages with multiple lexemes glossed as why in English, only one may be used metacommunicatively.In these cases, the lexeme used for meta-why must also be compatible with a reason-why reading: (32) A: ha'im bar tavo maxar Is-it-the-case Bar come-fut-3rd-sg tomorrow?"Will Bar be coming tomorrow?"B: lama?/ madua?why / why non-meta "Why (do you ask)?"/"Why (would she come)?"Hebrew (Ginzburg 2012: 313) (33) A: Kommt Bar morgen?come-pres.3sgBar tomorrow "Is Bar coming tomorrow?"B: Warum? / Weshalb?/ Wozu? why / why reason / why purpose "Why (do you ask)?"/"For what reason would she come?"/"What purpose would her coming serve?" German, following (32) This is intuitively unsurprising and is reflected in our working paraphrase for meta-why as asking for a reason for making a question speech act.However, we have already seen in Section 2.2.2, and will further see in the sections to follow, that meta-why should still be treated as a different lexical item from reason-why, irrespective of homophony.
In the rest of the article, starting with Section 3, we will provide evidence for our principal novel theoretical claim with respect to meta-why: that ellipsis is involved in meta-whyfragments.12

Evidence for ellipsis
In this section we deal with a type of data that Ginzburg (2012) does not discuss in relation to meta-why, namely data like (34): (34) A: Is Sally here?B: Why Sally?[⋍ why are you asking me this about Sally specifically?] (34) looks very similar to the phenomenon of why-stripping, shown in ( 35): (35) A: Sally is here.B: Why Sally?[= why is Sally, specifically, here (as opposed to some other person)?] Following Yoshida et al.'s (2015) generativist account of why-stripping, we will investigate meta-why-fragments that co-occur with a second, non-wh item, like (34), and propose that these data provide evidence for silent syntactic structure in meta-why-fragments.In line with Yoshida et al. (2015), we refer henceforth to the why in why-stripping as a why-remnant, and the non-wh material in examples like (34)-( 35) as the non-wh-remnant.stranding (( 40)-( 41)), all typical diagnostics for silent syntactic material as they are contingent on the presence of case assigners, binders and A′-movement.Meta-why-fragments pass all of these diagnostic tests too (see ( 37), ( 39) and ( 42)-( 43 Note, as do Yoshida et al. (2015), that all of these diagnostics also hold in cases of sluicing, as illustrated in ( 44)-( 46): The unavailability of that second reading of (50) suggests that the ellipsis involved in meta-why-fragments with non-wh-remnants is not sluicing.Moreover, other differences exist between why-stripping and meta-why-fragments on the one hand and sluicing on the other.
In the case of sluicing, only wh-constituents may form the remnant, though they may be any type of wh-constituent.In both why-stripping and meta-why-fragments of the type in (34), only a why remnant plus a non-wh-remnant can form the overall remnant.This may be smaller than a phrase and receives a focused interpretation.Note that in typical whystripping, how come may, for some speakers, take the place of why, but never in meta-whyfragments.
(51) Remnants: sluicing a. Katie did something at some time in some place with some person, but I don't know what/who/when/where/why/how/which thing… b.
Katie met a girl in the park but I don't know who *girl.
(52) Remnants: why-stripping A: Katie decided to make natto with Yasmeen in Huddersfield after the party.

B:
Why natto/Yasmeen/in Huddersfield/after the party?B′: %How come natto/Yasmeen/in Huddersfield/after the party?B′′: Why after/make?Why natto/Yasmeen/in Huddersfield/after the party?B′: *How come natto/Yasmeen/in Huddersfield/after the party?B′′: Why after/make?Finally, sluicing shows scope ambiguity in the clause to which ellipsis has applied, where whystripping does not (cf.Yoshida et al. 2015: 353-354).Meta-why-fragments are a case apart again, as why does not interact with the quantifier at all, given that it scopes over reasons for the speech act rather than the proposition(s) at issue.As a result, sluicing allows pair-list readings, which why-stripping and meta-why-fragments lack, but for different reasons.On the basis of the above evidence, we propose (a) that meta-why-fragments like with a nonwh-remnant contain silent syntactic structure and (b) that meta-why-fragments are not formed by sluicing.
Let us then outline Yoshida et al.'s (2015) proposal for why-stripping.First, they claim that the why-remnant in why-stripping does not move from an adjunct position in the clause, but is basegenerated high in the clause in what they call an "upper CP layer" (Yoshida et al. 2015: 346), CP being the highest projection (or layer of projections) in the clause in Cartographic syntax (cf.Rizzi 1997;2002 i.a.).This is motivated by the lack of scope ambiguity and the island insensitivity of why-stripping compared with why-sluicing, in which the why-remnant does appear to be extracted from an adjunct position.Second, they claim that the non-wh-remnant (e.g.Sally in ( 35)) is focus-moved to a position just below the position in which why is basegenerated.The analysis of this movement as focus-movement is motivated by the contrastive interpretation of the non-wh-remnant, the potentially non-phrasal nature of this remnant, its lack of constituency with the why-remnant and the lack of scope ambiguity. 14The structure of why-stripping is illustrated in ( 57 In the rest of the article, we will adopt the spirit of Yoshida et al's proposal given the similarities between meta-why-fragments and why-stripping identified above.However, there are still some differences between the two constructions.A core difference is that while why-stripping occurs in response to a declarative, meta-why-fragments can only respond to an interrogatively-typed question.Moreover, why-stripping can respond to embedded clauses, can be used without a linguistic antecedent, and can be itself embedded.We have already seen that these first two facts do not hold for meta-why-fragments; (58) below shows that the last of these is also impossible.
(58) A: Is Sally here?B: May I ask why *(you are asking me that)?
It is also the case that the why-remnant in English why-stripping can be interpreted as either purpose-or reason-, but not meta-, why: (59) A: Sally built a wall.B: Why a wall?A: To completely block her garden from her neighbours' view.Purpose A′: Because her neighbours kept looking through the fence into her garden.Reason A′′: #Because I thought you might want to borrow the plans.

Meta
We take these differences between why-stripping and meta-why-fragments to motivate three differences between our account to follow for meta-why and that of Yoshida et al. (2015) for why-stripping: (1) the position of the base-generated meta-why, 15 (2) the position of the nonwhy-remnant and, relatedly, (3) that meta-why-stripping can occur without a non-why-remnant (i.e. in cases of bare meta-why).We will henceforth refer to examples like (34) as meta-whystripping to distinguish them from typical why-stripping. 16aving established a basis for an ellipsis account, we now turn to the identity of the elided structure.There are two approaches that we could take to an ellipsis-based analysis of metawhy.Under the first type of account, meta-why could be the result of the ellipsis of the rest of a typical reason-why question such as "Why [are you asking me if Sally is here]?".Under the second, meta-why could scope over an illocutionary act of questioning that is realised in syntax through dedicated illocutionary act projections (cf.Speas & Tenny 2003, Hill 2007a;b;2013, Woods 2016;;2021), and the clause contained within the illocutionary act is elided.Section 4 will show that the first option is not tenable, whereas Section 5 shows that the second is promising in terms of capturing the meaning of and restrictions on meta-why.We will sketch the model of speech act syntax that we assume (Section 5.1) and the syntactic proposal we will pursue before providing additional justification for an ellipsis account (Section 5.2).We will then provide a description of the semantics of meta-why and indicate directions for formalising this, as well as modelling its role in discourse, to further motivate our account of its position in the speech act structure (Section 5.3).

What meta-why-fragments are not: Ellipsis of the rest of a typical 'why' question
Though we have already shown that meta-why is interpreted and distributes differently from a fragmentary reason-why, let us show definitively that an approach as illustrated in (60) is not tenable for meta-why-fragments.This analysis, with why in a position below ForceP in the extended CP (cf.Rizzi 2002), would collapse meta-why and reason-why readings, which is problematic for the English, German and the Russian data so far.It does not predict the fact that meta-why may only target the specific questioner's conversational background and motivations and, as IntP is embeddable, it does not preclude meta-why from use in indirect questions or explain some of the differences between meta-and typical why-stripping.
This type of analysis harks back to Ross's (1970) covert performative approach to speech acts, according to which all speech acts were embedded under a covert performative predicate, along with pronouns co-indexed with the discourse participants.His precise implementation, involving the elision of a full matrix clause plus complementiser such as "I ask you whether…" is, for reasons shown in Section 2, not likely to be correct for meta-why-fragments.Moreover, there are many possible predicates that could be elided, and no real way to tell which one has been: (61) a.
"Why do you want to know…?" Note that the answers to the different locutions in ( 61) might not all be compatible with each other in a discourse; one's reason for asking does not necessarily constitute a reason why an addressee should answer, for example: Note also that this approach would violate the No New Words condition (Chung 2006) on ellipsis 17 (see also Chung 2013 andMerchant 2013 on syntactic identity conditions for ellipsis), as this approach would be predicated on the idea that the silent predicates in (61) would have the potential to be pronounced.
Moreover, note that the interpretation of why-strips in contexts that only allow "why are you asking me…"-type locutions is interpreted as targeting a reason for the 'embedded' proposition, not the asking proposition: The absence of the reading "Why am I asking you about eggs right now?" in (63) suggests that the metacommunicative reading obtaining in meta-why-strips is due to a specific meta-whystripping mechanism and not to a typical why-strip over a silent or implied locution of the "Why are you asking me…"-type.The data in this paper so far does, however, indicate that the 17 Thanks to Anikó Lipták for this observation.

Woods and Vicente
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.1169linguistic antecedent for meta-why-strips includes syntactically-realised information about the illocutionary force and discourse participants.
In our proposal, we adopt a modern version of speech act syntax that does not encode a full embedding clause and we provide evidence for a very high base position for meta-why.

What we think they are: Ellipsis of a ForceP contained within an illocutionary act
The tree in (64) illustrates the core of our proposal, in which SAP stands for Speech Act Phrase and IAP stands for Illocutionary Act Phrase: In this proposal, ForceP-the propositional domain-is deleted in meta-why-fragments.What remains is the speech act domain where syntax interfaces with discourse, following our claims that meta-why is a discourse-level modifier rather than forming part of the propositional content of the utterance.The IA head question is an operator that we claim is present in all question utterances, though it is typically silent in English.This proposal is contingent on a particular instantiation of speech act syntax, which we will outline before justifying its use in this context.We will not justify the speech act syntax enterprise itself here, and instead direct readers to the works cited in the rest of the paper.

Our speech act syntax framework
We adopt here Woods's (2016;2021) approach to speech act syntax, which combines many of the principles of Hill (2007a) et seq.with details and terminology from Krifka (2014).In this approach, there are two discourse-related projections available in all root clauses above the clause typing head (here Force), teasing apart different projections for clause type (ForceP), illocutionary force (the Illocutionary Act Phrase, or IAP) and speech act-related syntactic items (the Speech Act Phrase, or SAP).
The differences between the IAP and the SAP are as follows.The IAP hosts syntactic items, both overt and covert, that encode information about the intended interpretation of the typed clause from the point of view of the speaker (cf.Woods 2016; 2021, also Coniglio & Zegrean 2012 for an earlier incarnation of this idea).Items in the IAP include discourse particles (Hill 2007a;Coniglio & Zegrean 2012;Haegeman & Hill 2013), which are known to cross-cut clause type but correlate with illocutionary meanings (i.e.what the speaker is committing to in terms of their knowledge and desires for the conversation), and overt markers of illocutionary force, e.g.request markers (Woods 2021). 18We assume, like Coniglio & Zegrean (2012), a featural approach to clause typing, so the IAP selects for the relevant type of ForceP that can check its clause type features.
The SAP, in contrast, hosts syntactic items that quantify over that utterance (that is, the propositional content and its force), for example speech act adverbs, and elements that restrict or otherwise alter the ways in which the addressee may felicitously respond to the illocutionary act, such as the outmost particles in sentence final particle strings in Cantonese (Lam 2014; see also Wiltschko & Heim 2016).
Consequently, the IAP is inward-looking in the sense that it relates the propositional content to a specific discourse context, in particular to a specific speaker's intentions for that propositional 18 Woods ( 2021) also provides a direct comparison of Cartographic (Cinque 1999) and speech act syntax accounts including Hill (2007) et seq., Wiltschko & Heim (2016) and Krifka (2021), as well as a tentative proposal that Cinque's (1999) EvidentialP may be equivalent to IAP.
content.Insodoing, the IAP is interpreted as an utterance entity. 19The SAP is outward-looking and situates the utterance within that wider discourse, that is, as a move made and committed to by the speaker relative to prior discourse moves and future anticipated discourse moves.The IAP is embeddable in certain constructions often referred to embedded root clauses (cf.Hooper & Thompson 1973;Heycock 2006;Djärv 2019), such as Germanic embedded verb second (Krifka 2014), embedded inverted questions in English (Woods 2016) and embedded root-like constructions in Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese (Suñer 1993;Lahiri 2002;Mascarenhas 2009; González i Planas 2014; Villa-García 2015).The SAP is exclusively a root phenomenon (Ceong 2019).
Central to the analysis here is the claim that information-seeking questions have a specific IA head-question-which indicates explicitly that the ForceP it embeds is to be interpreted as an open information-seeking question and not as some other kind of 'directive' (in Searle's 1976 sense) such as a request or a command, even if the form of that propositional content is also typical of a request or command.The question head lifts the interrogative clause, a syntactic object, to the type of an utterance, e, which is interpreted as an information-seeking question act.To distinguish between this type of discourse entity and other entities, we might call the type of an utterance e u , where u indicates 'utterance'.Adopting Lahiri's (2002) approach to coercion of propositions to an utterance entity, the following rule applies in the illocutionary act phrase.In this rule we assume a set Q of propositions expressed by ForceP of the type ⟨st,t⟩, a context c and an individual u that is an utterance entity: As such, the semantics of question are as follows: (66) Defined if the epistemic state of the utterer of u in c is not a subset of the answers to Q and if the answer to Q is not a member of the shared discourse information (common ground).
To paraphrase and adapt Lahiri (2002: 281), utt in ( 65)-( 66) is defined as a two-place predicate with the meaning that u is an utterance of the precise expression Q of the semantic type of a set of propositions.Moreover, the utterance u is taken from (was made in) the context c.
This operator composes with the ForceP as follows: (67) is Sally here question is therefore a function from a set of propositions, expressed as Q, to an utterance (discourse entity) made by the speaker with the content and form.A terminological note: Krifka (2014) refers to illocutionary acts not as utterance entities but as context change potentials.We believe that the potential to move the conversation forward comes at the next syntactic level, SAP, as in root clauses, the IAP is then taken as the complement of the SA head, which is concerned with response patterns to the utterance act (i.e. the potential to change the discourse context).Where, then, does meta-why fit in?We will argue that metawhy modifies not the utterance act by the original speaker, but how it is to impact on the discourse structure; therefore, meta-why modifies the SAP.We will justify this more fully in Section 5.3.
We can now make a proposal about the nature of the ellipsis site under meta-why.We claim that to achieve bare meta-why-fragments, ellipsis applies to the complement of the IA head: In the case of non-bare meta-why (i.e.meta-why-strips), the proposal in (68) necessitates that the non-wh-remnant must move into a position above the IA head but below why.We assume here that the remnant adjoins to IAP and will pick up this point in Section 5.3.2.
The reason that ellipsis can apply is because the structure under meta-why is identical to its antecedent, namely the question that meta-why is responding to, and so can be elided on the basis of redundancy.However, this should also mean that ellipsis is not obligatory and indeed, we find cases of full overt questions under meta-why.We will now present such data to support our proposal that ForceP is the ellipsis site.

Evidence for ellipsis under a question-headed IAP
The following constructed examples in English (69), Spanish (70) and Turkish ( 71) demonstrate that ellipsis is not obligatory under meta-why as it can embed an overt question in full.They also demonstrate that meta-why-strips are possible in which the non-why-remnant is a whelement from the embedded question.
( 20 One non-linguist informant notes that who feels like a quotation in this utterance.We consider this intuition positive for our analysis because it indicates that the deleted material does pertain to the original speech act, and can be reproduced verbatim.Moreover, Andrew Weir (p.c) draws our attention to meta-why-strips like (i) below: (i) A: Do you fancy Mary?B: Why me?B′: Why you?
Response B shows second-to-first pronoun shift, as expected under typical why-stripping.But response B′ also seems licit if 'you' is treated as a quotation, with quotation intonation.This suggests that there may be another way of deriving fragments under meta-why via an approach to quotation, though this cannot be the only route to deriving meta-why-fragments (see, for example, ( 72)-( 73) below).Due to space restrictions we leave this for further work.
21 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for an original example, adapted here.
22 All Turkish data is from Deniz Özyıldız, p.c., with thanks.Özyıldız notes that Turkish has two items that serve as meta-why: neden (lit.'why') and nasil (lit.'how'), both of which enter into meta-why-stripping.Note that in all the above cases, there is no intonational break between the why element and the embedded question and they all consist of one intonational contour. 23he data above support an ellipsis account of meta-why-fragments as they provide evidence for syntactic structure below meta-why and for the focus-movement aspect of our proposal.In ( 69)-( 71), the why-strip by outraged parent B has two dimensions.While the why-strip can potentially be answered-why is A asking a "who" question specifically-an additional rhetorical effect of this construction, especially clear in the fully spelled out version in (69), is a rejection of A's question as orthogonal to the shocking (!) news at hand.We do not want to claim that rejection is integral to the meaning of meta-why, but it is plausibly the pragmatic result of focusing the entirety of A's question.We return briefly to this idea in Section 5.3.
These data also support an analysis in which meta-why is treated as different from reason-why.
Multiple wh-fronting is ungrammatical in English and Spanish, and Turkish does not even have overt wh-fronting, yet the data above are licit. 24Moreover, as we have already claimed, meta-why modifies the utterance in its discourse context rather than contributing to its truthconditional content.This also accords well with the evidence that meta-why-fragments are crucially not identical in meaning to questions of the form "Why are you asking me that?" A final note: the question that is elided under meta-why must be a question-headed IAP and not simply any IAP that embeds an interrogatively-typed ForceP.Recall that only interrogativelytyped information-seeking questions are available under meta-why; this holds in the case that the original question is fully spelled out too: ( Note that examples ( 72)-( 73) also illustrate that an overt question embedded under metawhy cannot straightforwardly be an opaque quotation, or else their ungrammaticality is not predicted. 26  The evidence in this section shows that full questions or remnants containing wh-words can be spelled out under meta-why in a number of languages.We take this as strong support for our claim that meta-why-fragments are derived by ellipsis of a ForceP, and that that ForceP must be embedded under an illocutionary act operator, specifically question.

A brief excursus: languages without meta-why-stripping
Let us briefly consider again languages whose meta-why equivalent does not derive from the word for why, for example Russian.We have suggested that these items are truly non-sentential, 18 Woods and Vicente Glossa: a journal of general linguistics DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.1169so we would predict that the meta-why equivalent in these languages may not appear with an additional non-wh-remnant or a full recapitulation of the question.This is borne out in Russian, as shown in ( 74 Fenno-Swedish is another language in which bare varför (lit 'why') cannot be used metacommunicatively and hur så (lit.'how so') is employed instead (Anders Holmberg, p.c.).In Fenno-Swedish, as in Russian, hur så cannot participate in why-stripping.

(75)
Fenno-Swedish A: Är Sally här?Is Sally here?"Is Sally here?"B: Hur så (* ?Sally)?How so (Sally)?"Why?" [⋍Why are you asking me that?]However, Holmberg also reports the following exchange to be licit, as it is in the Swedish spoken in Sweden: (76) Fenno-Swedish A: Är Sally här? B: Varför Sally?(lit."Why Sally?") Holmberg also notes that in the Fenno-Swedish equivalent of our cooking teacher example in (63), a varför-strip also behaves like a typical why-strip again.Holmberg suggests that "Sally" in B's response in (76) could be a hanging topic, in which case the utterance would contain something like sluicing rather than stripping.However, this does not explain why the metacommunicative intention obtains in (76) when it does not in the absence of the non-whyremnant, leading us to conclude that ( 76) is a case of meta-why-stripping.We will return to why (76) is licit while bare meta-varför is illicit in Fenno-Swedish in Section 5.3.2.
To return to our main data, having established that ellipsis of an illocutionary question act is the process by which meta-why-fragments are derived, we now justify why we believe that the meta-why element is an SAP-adjoined modifier of how the utterance entity affects the discourse context.

A descriptive semantics and pragmatics for meta-why
In this section we further justify our proposed syntax for meta-why by describing its meaning and modelling its pragmatic impact.We will not give formal semantic denotations for meta-why or for SAP because to fully formalise these would constitute another article in length, but we will make clear what we feel should be the direction of travel for formalising the semantics of these items, and direct readers to existing literature on the relevant concepts as we go.

Modelling meta-why as a discourse-level modifier
A core purpose of this section is to justify the claim made in Section 5.2 that meta-why is not simply the wh-word why in a high clausal position.Throughout this paper we have indicated 27 Thanks to David Erschler and Tanya Philippova for judgments and data.Note that it is also the case that a chto is not compatible with full overt questions either, unlike meta-why (see Section 5.2).Woods and Vicente Glossa: a journal of general linguistics DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.1169 using ⋍ that meta-why only approximates a request for a reason for making some speech act, and that the environments that permit meta-why are a subset of the possible environments that typical reason-why questions can be used in.We propose that a better paraphrase for meta-why is "There's some reason for your question that I'm not understanding", to really capture that the original questioner's intentions alone determine the response, rather than any potentially plausible answer to the non-meta-why question "Why are you asking me that?", as well as the intuition that these intentions are unknown to the user of meta-why.If we test this paraphrase on meta-why and "Why are you asking me that?" in their differing contexts, we see that it is licit where meta-why is licit (( 77) and ( 80)) and not otherwise: (77) A: Is Sally here?B: There's some reason for your question that I'm not understanding… (78) A: Billy said he was going to the moon.

B:
He said what? A: #There's some reason for your question that I'm not understanding… (79) Cookery teacher, to class: a.How many eggs should I add to the cake, and #there's some reason for my question that I'm not understanding….b.
How many eggs should I add to the cake, and why am I asking you this? (80)

Context: an outraged parent [B] is telling a friend [A] about discovering an alcoholic beverage in their teenager's bedroom. A says:
A: But who were they drinking it with?B: There's some reason for your question that I'm not understanding… This paraphrase reflects the fact that meta-why is a non-canonical response to the question by the interlocutor to whom the question is addressed-in short, they do not answer the question.However, while it affects the next steps in the discourse, its use does not reject or represent a refusal to answer the question outright.
Moreover, as we have already shown, meta-why is also highly dependent on the prior, currently live discourse move being an open information-seeking question.It can never stand alone from, or precede or anticipate, that question act, whereas locutions like "Why might I be about to ask you X?" are perfectly acceptable.For these reasons, we conceive of meta-why as a modifier of a speech act or, more precisely, the modifier of a context-change potential.To progress in this section, we shall first present Krifka's (2014) semantic proposal for illocutionary operators and context change potentials, then discuss how (and to what extent) that kind of proposal presents a plausible way ahead for formalising the meaning of SAP and meta-why.We will present some empirical evidence for our proposed meaning for SAP and for meta-why being an SAP-level modifier, before demonstrating how these proposed meanings play out in a model of discourse, specifically Farkas & Bruce's (2010) Table model.Krifka (2014) takes a dynamic approach to speech acts, based on work by Szabolcsi (1982), in which speech acts are an "index changing device" (Krifka 2014: 64).Krifka claims that in making a speech act, the speaker not only expresses an attitude but also takes on certain commitments with respect to the content of that attitude, in the case of an assertion, this is the "liability" that the proposition expressed is true and that evidence can be presented in support of that truth (Krifka 2014: 65).He claims that the production of the speech act results, instantaneously, in an update in the commitment state of the speaker to the effect just described.Commitment states can, however, be modified-Krifka describes cases such as repeated assertions, where the speaker's commitment to the content of the assertion holds from its first production, but repeated instances of the assertion, rather than leading to tautology or redundancy, might instead increase the strength of the commitment of the speaker (Krifka 2014: 65-66).On the basis of these data we claim it is justified to separate off the utterance act from markers of commitment, overt or covert, and from any modification of that commitment, by the current speaker.We achieve this by distinguishing between the IAP and SAP projections, where the SA head selects for an IAP complement.Consequently, we claim that meta-why modifies the SAP, not the IAP.
Returning to our description of the semantics and pragmatics of these projections, Krifka (2014: 69) notes that the process in (83) results in an event ("as with index changes in general").As should be evident from the discussion above, the level at which this happensand at which we are claiming meta-why operates-is one at which we move from true 'semantic' composition to a form of discourse composition, where the nature of the objects being combined and modified moves from (sets of) propositions to discourse entities and events.As a result, we need to think more carefully about how discourse composition might work, and what discourse modification would then mean-and specifically for this paper, what meta-why modifies with respect to the discourse structure.We will not go deep into detail here but will use a model concerned with the effects on discourse continuations of basic assertions and polar questions (i.e.propositional content embedded under speech act operators), namely that of Farkas & Bruce (2010), to take a first, descriptive, pass at modelling the effect of a meta-why-utterance on the discourse continuation.We will also use this model to define the commitments involved in the uttering of a question act.We therefore caveat what follows as being the first step on the road to understanding discourse modification, with plenty of work that must follow up on this.
As alluded to at the start of this section, we believe that a meta-why utterance does not introduce a new question into the discourse.This might seem like a strange proposal, as meta-why utterances start with a "question" word, often have rising intonation and elicit an answer that (as we've discussed extensively) looks a lot like an answer to a reason-why question.However, as ( 77) and ( 80) illustrate, meta-why's impact is not exactly the same as that of a question-it appears to 'freeze' the context update that the question would normally make at the point of the change where the commitments come to hold, for the specific purposes of clarification and expansion on the motivations behind the speaker's question.We will show how meta-why and other wh-questions differ in detail in what follows.
The addition of the propositional content of S[D] to the projected set (cf. the possible second indices in Krifka's system).
Assertions of some proposition are for Farkas and Bruce, therefore, also a function from input context states to output context states, where in the output context states the effects of the three changes above hold.This process is visualised in Table 1 for the simple root assertion "Sam is home", taken from Farkas & Bruce (2010: 91).In Table 1, the input context state K 0 consists of no prior discourse commitments or items on the Table, and the existing common ground (shared information) and projected sets both consist of s 1 , the initial common ground at the start of the conversation.
Note that the projected set in Table 1 contains only the input projected set and its union with the singleton proposition expressed by S[D].This is because Farkas and Bruce claim that there are We claim that this effect is derived as follows.Meta-why marks removal of B's acceptance of liability from the projected set as projected by B by expressing (though not asserting) a new proposition that B believes there's a reason for the original question that they don't understand.It cannot remove that liability from A's discourse commitments-that would be far too powerful a move and is not directly reflected in the information that meta-why conveys.
Remember that the form of the utterance containing meta-why contains the original question and is therefore interrogative in form (even in the case where ellipsis has applied and there is no non-why-remnant).However, its effect on the discourse is modified such that neither the addition of p nor ¬p to the common ground (via the projected set) constitute canonical responses.What, then, is the canonical response to a meta-why-utterance?
Let us first lay out what we claim a meta-why-utterance adds to the table (with a small 't').The projected set will, like an assertion, contain a new proposition.Unlike an assertion, however, the proposition conveyed by meta-why is not directly at issue (in the sense of Simons et al. (2010) and cannot be directly challenged, so goes directly into the new projected set and is not added to the Table (with a big 'T').The original question remains unanswered, but is also not part of the projected set resulting from a meta-why utterance.A meta-why utterance does not add {p, ¬p} to the table again.This is the real 'freezing' effect of meta-why, that it stops the content it modifies from being at issue (a little like embedding) but does not add its own at issue content (unlike embedding).What meta-why utterances add to the Table, then, is the sentence form meta-why plus the material it modifies, without any at-issue propositional content (represented below by the empty set).Given that meta-why utterances do, however, add not-at-issue content that must be added to the common ground, and a sentence form whose utterance also needs to be recorded, it still constitutes a discourse move that needs to be dealt with.The resolution of the original question, and the presence of a true answer to it in some projected set, must therefore wait for a further update.
This means that there the canonical response to a meta-why-utterance is for A to accept-and they can only do so tacitly-that B believes there's some information that they are missing.We refer to this proposition expressed by B via meta-why as q and visualise the use of meta-why in response to a polar question "Is Sam here?" in Table 3.
The projected set in K 3 is coherent and achievable, in that it is possible and internally consistent.Moreover, the meta-why utterance will be removed from the Table after its utterance as it is resolved-there is no propositional content related to it that is on the Table and not in a projected set.The problem is that as A's acceptance of the projected set in Table 3 must be tacit and so the conversation will stall-there is no prescribed next overt discourse move by either A or B, yet A's unresolved question is still on the Table, their commitment that B should take liability for answering their question is still publicly live (and has not been overtly rejected), and A cannot answer their own question.A therefore has to persuade B to take liability for the answering A's question, which A can do by providing a reason as to why they asked the question.This results in the discourse situation in  (2010) for more on the mechanics of this).B will have to accept A's new assertion (their reason for asking the question, here r), before either can return to the question of {p,¬p}.In Table 4, A has tacitly agreed to go with the projected set from Table 3 so B's discourse commitments are empty.A is still the only discourse participant who is committed to B's liability for the truth of p or ¬p and additionally they are committed to r and to being liable for its truth.The projected set is biased towards future common grounds containing r and A's liability for r, as this is the canonical result of making an assertion.It is also biased towards B accepting liability for the truth of some answer to {p,¬p}, as the aim of conversation is to try to make all of public commitments shared ones, and A has not yet indicated that they are happy to drop B's liability for the truth of some answer to {p,¬p}, nor have A and B negotiated an agreement to disagree on it.To summarise this section, we have claimed that meta-why is a discourse level modifier that takes a dynamic question speech act object-an utterance event with an interrogative form that projects multiple possible discourse continuations that the addressee is urged to choose between-and modifies what those available discourse continuations are.It does this without adding any new asserted or questioned content to the Table, but (a) by proposing to add a proposition directly to the new projected set that there is some reason for the question that B does not know and (b) by removing B's liability for answering the question from the projected set.This results in no next discourse move being defined, forcing the original questioner to find a way to persuade B to accept liability for the original question, i.e. to clarify why they asked the question.

If B accepts the projected set in
Before moving on, we would highlight that this proposal groups meta-why together with other elements that modify specific types of utterance by altering how they may be responded to or expressing elements of the relationship between the speaker, the addressee and what each wants the other to know or do.This group of elements includes the Romanian particle oare briefly discussed in Farkas & Bruce (2010) and Canadian English confirmational eh (Wiltschko et al. 2018).Taking the latter as an example, we see how the addition of eh to a command modifies its interpretation and the range of felicitous responses to it: (101) Canadian English, Wiltschko et al. (2018: 583) RD: Call me later, eh? RD's son: Yeah.Are you going to be at work or?
In naturalistic example (101), the command Call me later is modified by eh such that it additionally requires the addressee to confirm overtly that they agree to comply.As Wiltschko et al. (2018: 582) note, this extra restriction on the discourse "is evidenced by the addressee's response, yeah, which would be an infelicitous response to the command."Note that OK, a typically felicitous response to a command, is also still possible.What is not felicitous is a failure to respond verbally by the addressee, which is typically a perfectly appropriate response to commands in general.
Another example of using particles to modify speaker commitment involves the use of response particles like yes and no to express whether the speaker believes a previous speech act to be set up here is between the question asked about Berlin and the set of all other questions that the speaker might have asked (indeed, utterances that they might have uttered).In ( 106), the contrast that emerges is between Berlin and the set of other issues that Barling might take a stance on.In other words, meta-why-strips always query some focused element relative to all the utterances that a speaker might make, rather than relative to other possible propositions.This motivates the proposal that the non-wh-remnant in meta-why-strips moves to a projection concerning interlocutor attitudes (the structure of the discourse) rather than one concerning the information structure of the proposition.
This approach to focus finds some support from Zimmermann (2008: 348-349), who argues that analyses of contrastive focus should take into account "the speaker's assumptions about what the hearer considers to be likely or unlikely [and] contain [information] on the background assumptions of speaker and hearer" on the basis of the variable realisation of contrastive focus in a range of languages.Zimmermann argues that focus marking, whether by intonational or morphological means, appears to be mediated by the speaker's judgment on whether the hearer will expect the focus content based on the common ground that they share (Zimmermann 2008: 354-355).What meta-why-strips appear to do is mark that the utterer of the meta-why-strip, the original addressee, does not share the common ground required to, in their opinion, adequately answer the original question, but knows that some information exists that the original speaker has not yet shared (given that they asked a question with this content in the first place).
By proposing that the non-wh-remnant in meta-why-strips moves into the discourse layer, we can also account for the fact that typical why-strips are contingent on ellipsis, i.e. never permit full spell out of the ellipsis site, while meta-why-strips do permit full reproduction of the original ForceP. 31The clause or utterance itself cannot be in focus in a typical why-strip because both the focus position and the why remnant are lower than the discourse-structural positions.
In other words, they are themselves part of the propositional structure.In contrast, meta-why and the non-wh-remnant in a meta-why-strip are above ForceP so ForceP can be taken as the largest non-why-remnant.This predicts that material that is base-generated in IAP or SAP, e.g. the highest types of speech act adverb, should not be able to be part of the non-why-remnant in a meta-why-strip, and this appears to be borne out.
(107) A: Seriously, who did you see last night?B: Why (*seriously) who did I see last night?
The focus association property of meta-why also helps us (tentatively) explain the paradoxical data from Fenno-Swedish as outlined in Section 5.2.1.Recall that the equivalent of bare metawhy, hur så (lit.'how so?') did not participate in meta-why-stripping, and varför ('why') could not be used in its bare form, but the meta-why-strip Varför Sally?('Why Sally?') is permitted.
Both bare varför and meta-varför-stripping are available in the Swedish spoken in Sweden, whereas Finnish, the majority language of the communities in which Fenno-Swedish speakers tend to live, has a meta-why equivalent miten niin that also literally means 'how so?' and does not permit meta-why-stripping. 32We assume that contact with Finnish has influenced Fenno-Swedish's bare meta-why, but that meta-varför-stripping persists as long as the non-wh-remnant is overt, presumably because there is some structural difference between hur så and metavarför, both of which are present in and reinforced in the input from both languages that make up the language repertoire of Fenno-Swedish speakers.We make no further speculations about the nature of language contact in Fenno-Swedish, or exactly how it would result in the 'dual approach' to metacommunicative acts that we see in Fenno-Swedish.
However, this leads us to query whether bare meta-why in languages like English and German is subject to the same ellipsis mechanism as meta-why-stripping, or whether it is plausibly a different, non-sentential, element as per Ginzburg (2012).We claim that bare meta-why still results from this stripping-like ellipsis mechanism for three reasons.Firstly, we still need to account for its restriction to 'freezing' interrogatively-typed information-seeking questions.

(
member of the cooking class.B is the teacher.A1: Why are you asking me how many eggs?B1: To check your learning/To engage the class/Because it's a typical teacher technique to avoid monologuing.A2: Why should I answer your question about how many eggs?B2: To check your learning/#To engage the class/#?Because I'm trying to avoid monologuing.
cookery teacher to the class.How many eggs do you add, and why eggs?[= why should you add eggs at this point in the process?] [≠ why am I asking you about eggs right now?]

stranding in German: why-stripping
B: Why her 1 own book?Adapted from Yoshida et al. 2015: 332 (39) Variable binding effects: meta-why-fragments A: Did any linguist 1 here recommend her 1 own book?B: Why her 1 own book?[⋍ why are you asking me about [each of those linguists]' 1 own book specifically?](40) Preposition-stranding in English: why-stripping A: Ashley talked to Jamie.B: Why (to) Jamie?Adapted from Yoshida et al. 2015: 334 (41) Preposition- wants someone.datflatter.infbutthey know not who.dat/who.accHewants to flatter someone but they don't know who.Ashley has spoken with someone, but I don't know who (with)."Why-stripping,meta-why-fragments and sluicing are also all island insensitive, in that the moved non-wh-remnant (bolded in the examples below) can be extracted from an island in the elided material: he Katie loves a girl who is learning some language, but I don't know which language.(49)Islandinsensitivity:meta-why-strippingA:Wholoves the girl who is learning Italian?B:Why Italian? [⋍ Why are you asking me about Italian specifically?]However, a sub-type of sluicing, why-sluicing, differs from (47)-(49) in that it is subject to far stricter locality restrictions:(50) Island sensitivity: why-sluicing Katie loves a girl who is learning Italian, but I don't know why.[= why Katie loves a girl who is learning Italian] [≠ why that girl is learning Italian] Finally, they claim that ellipsis in why-stripping is obligatory because the structure above only results due to ellipsis.As focus is usually marked by stress in situ in English, if the focused material is contained within the ellipsis site, the focus information will not be recoverable (cf.Pesetsky 1997) if movement of the focused material out of the ellipsis site does not apply.Woods and Vicente ), and a sentential response is necessary instead: Speech acts, then, are a different kind of semantic object than we have henceforth been dealing with-they are not truth values (propositions) or sets of truth values (interrogatives); nor are they entities.Instead, they are changes from one index to another, where at the first index a commitment state did not hold but at a second index the commitment state does hold.KrifkaWoods and Vicente Table model for discourse.Similarly to Krifka, they treat speech acts as dynamic objects with the potential to update the discourse context.Focusing initially on assertions, they tabulate three changes that a single declarative sentence S[D] makes when asserted in an input context K i :

Table 1
K 1 : A asserts "Sam is home" relative to K 0 .

Table 4 ,
where the set projected by A includes both the acceptance of their new assertion and the acceptance by B of liability for the question that is still on the Table.Note that the projected set does not contain either p or ¬p, because only one discourse move on the Table can be dealt with at any one time (seeFarkas & Bruce

Table 4 ,
they should then explicitly proffer liability for some true answer to {p,¬p} by asserting p or ¬p as appropriate.Once this is done, A's original question will itself be removed from the Table as either p or ¬p will move into the common ground via the projected set proffered by B.

Table 4
K 4 : A asserts "I have a meeting with them" relative to the input context K 3 .