Can Multiple Contents Be Simultaneously At-Issue?

There is a prevailing assumption in the at-issueness literature that utterances express exactly one content (usually a proposition) that is at-issue, with any other contents being not-at-issue. This article examines this assumption critically, asking whether it can ever be the case that multiple contents are at-issue simultaneously. Looking at the three leading approaches to defining at-issueness, and considering them as both backward- and forward-oriented phenomena, we observe some similarities and some divisions among how these approaches answer this question. We spotlight conjoined question sequences, an empirical construction that might require multiple contents to be simultaneously at-issue, and discuss how these various approaches might account for the observed data.