It has been known for about thirty years that the adjunct ‘why’ differs from other wh-elements in point of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The chapters propose original research on the syntax and semantics of ‘why’ and at the syntax-prosody interface from many different languages to further our understanding of the reason adjunct. Its merge position is examined in some languages encoding more than one lexical entry and in others having one lexical item. The apparent exception to the generalisation about its merge position calls for the clear-cut distinction between the reason interpretation and the ‘how come’ interpretation of such why-questions. A particular class of why-questions are investigated in some in-situ languages - those formed on the wh-element ‘what’. These chapters answer two central questions: What is the source of the causal reading of the post-verbal ‘what’-element? Is the sentence-initial ‘what’-element externally-merged in the left periphery? The articles in this collection represent the first cross-linguistic study of high and low reason adjuncts, postverbal ‘what’ as why-questions in in-situ languages, while also focusing on the semantics of why-rhetorical questions and on how come questions. weiterlesen