Mandarin wh-conditionals as interrogative conditionals

Authors

  • Mingming Liu Rutgers University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v26i0.3955

Abstract

This paper examines wh-conditionals in Mandarin Chinese. It argues that wh-conditionals involve embedding two questions within a conditional, one in the antecedent and one in the consequent. Transition from a Hamblin/Karttunen question meaning to a conditional semantics is achieved by answerhood operators. The meaning obtained in this way is simple and intuitive: answers to the antecedent question already contains information to answer the consequent question.

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Published

2016-11-07

Issue

Section

Articles