Mandarin WH-conditionals: A dynamic question approach
Haoze Li
May 2021 

Mandarin has a special construction widely known as a ‘wh-conditional’, in which both the antecedent clause and the consequent clause are wh-clauses. Wh-conditionals are of interest to linguists because the wh-expressions in a wh-conditional must co-refer. How to make sense of the fusion of a conditional and two wh-clauses, as well as the nature of the co-reference relation, have been long-standing issues. Two competing approaches have been advanced to shed light on wh-conditionals: the indefinite approach (Cheng and Huang 1996; Chierchia 2000; a.o.), which treats wh-expressions as indefinites that exhibit dynamic potentials, and the question-categorial approach (Xiang 2016, 2020a; Liu 2016, 2017), which treats wh-clauses as questions denoting functions of various types (or categories). Both approaches face nontrivial challenges, but at the same time have unique advantages each. The goal of this paper is to devise an alternative approach that borrows insights from these two approaches but advoids their shortcomings. On the one hand, the proposed analysis treats wh-clauses as questions. On the other hand, it recognizes the dynamic potential of interrogative wh-expressions, i.e., their ability to introduce discourse referents. A wh-conditional is analyzed as quantification over the values of these discourse referents, which creates the impression of co-reference of the wh-expressions involved (via unselective binding). To the extent that the present analysis is on the right track, it extends the application of the dynamic potential of wh-expressions beyond anaphora.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005887 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Accepted for Natural Language Semantics
keywords:	wh-conditionals, conditionals, dynamic semantics, hamblin semantics, discourse referents, semantics
previous versions:	v1 [April 2021]
Downloaded:	724 times

 

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