Verbless directives and verbless interrogatives in German: what expresses their directive meaning?

German exhibits an independent non-verbal construction named verbless directives (VDs). VDs consist of PPs and/or particles which express directions and order the hearer to move referents of theme arguments. According to Fortmann (2018), VDs can be converted into interrogative sentences, which have modal interpretations and are called verbless interrogatives (VIS) in this paper. However, VIs are well-formed only when theme arguments are not coreferential with the speaker. I argue that VDs whose theme arguments are identical to the hearer lack high Mod (cf. Hacquard 2006) and cannot be converted into VIs because they do not retain elements expressing directive meaning.