Relevance-Based Partition Semantics for Why-Questions

This work argues that partition semantics can be extended to cover whyquestions 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.