Relevance-Based Partition Semantics for Why-Questions
Jonathan Shaheen

Abstract:
This work argues that partition semantics can be extended to cover
why-questions and their answers, and then develops such an
extension. Building on Jeroen Groenendijk’s Logic of Interrogation and
incorporating a theory of why-questions initially put forward by Bas
van Fraassen, it provides a unified notion of contextual answerhood
for both why-questions and constituent questions. Non-constructive and
constructive versions of the semantics are indicated, their
meta-logical features are briefly explored, and two applications for
the semantics are described.