Meta-why questions are an understudied fragmentary question consisting of the wh-phrase why only. They are used when the speaker wants to know why the other interlocutor raised an original question in a context. Recently, Woods and Vicente (2021) examine meta-why questions in English, and Park (2023) argues, building on them, that the same type of questions exist in Korean as well. According to these studies, meta-why questions in English and Korean can be legitimately used only when their antecedents are genuine questions. This squib aims to report apparently challenging data, where declaratives or even non-verbal behavior appears to serve as an antecedent of meta-why questions in Korean. It is shown that declaratives can feed the legitimate use of a meta-why question, while only very limited cases of nonverbal behavior can license it. The squib ends with a brief discussion of what these challenging data suggest to Park’s analysis.
1. Introduction
2. Distribution of Meta-why Questions in Korean
3. Challenging Data
4. Concluding Remarks
References