In this article, we investigate questions like What is your name again? , which presuppose that the answer was already made common-ground knowledge in the past ( Sauerland 2006 ). We call this a remind-me presupposition. While repetitive particles can trigger a remind-me presupposition in German and English, Japanese uses a specialized particle kke to bring about such a presupposition. We argue for an account of remind-me presuppositions based on syntactic decomposition of the question speech-act into an imperative part and a make-it-known part. On this account, the repetitive particles take scope between the two parts of the decomposed question speech-act. The proposal correctly predicts how both particles interact syntactically with the periphery of the clause in slightly different ways. The interaction with polar questions corroborates our proposal that the decomposed question speech-act parts are syntactically projected parts of the question structure. Our data therefore corroborate a syntactic representation of aspects of speech-acts.

Theories of total reconstruction have generally supposed that movement can be followed by an undoing operation like LF lowering (May 1977, 1985) or deletion of higher copies (Chomsky 1993). We argue that reconstruction effects can be derived only if the original movement is purely phonological. There are no undoing operations. We present three distinct arguments, based on an interaction between raising and wh -movement in English, facts from agreement with group terms in British English, and multiple scrambling in Japanese. The arguments imply that the T-model is correct in supposing that movement that affects both LF and PF must precede movement that affects only PF.