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Mandarin wh-Conditionals: Challenges and Facts

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Varieties of Alternatives

Part of the book series: Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics ((FiCL,volume 3))

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Abstract

Wh-conditionals refer to a type of construction found in Mandarin (Cheng and Huang 1996; Chierchia 2000).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A Tungussic language spoken in the southern part of Russian Far East. In (2), mi is a simultaneous.converb (sim.cvb) (Baek 2016), a verbal suffix indicating subordination.

  2. 2.

    The names antecedent and consequent as well as wh-conditional presuppose that we are taking wh-conditionals to be a type of conditional (Cheng and Huang 1996; Lin 1996; Chierchia 2000), which however is debatable (Huang 2010; Crain and Luo 2011). We nevertheless have to start somewhere. I will in this section assume following Cheng and Huang; Lin; Chierchia that wh-conditionals are conditionals, postponing discussion to later sections.

  3. 3.

    A fact that I will have to leave to future research.

  4. 4.

    We construe the term PSI very broadly as including negative polarity items like ever, free choice items like any/irgendein as well as epistemic indefinites, following Chierchia (2013).

  5. 5.

    De is a modification marker that appears between a noun and its modifiers (adjectives, possessors, relative clauses, etc.) in Mandarin.

  6. 6.

    More syntactically oriented approaches include (Bruening and Tran 2006; Cheung 2006).

  7. 7.

    jo according to Dayal (1991) is a relative morpheme distinct from interrogative pronouns. The gloss of it as ‘which’ comes from Dayal (1996: 12). Nevertheless, wh-morphology is cross-linguistically used in correlatives (see Lipták 2009 for cross-linguistic data).

  8. 8.

    This is the official semantics Crain and Luo (2011: 173) give (see also Luo and Crain 2011: (52e)), under their (19e). Their informal paraphrase, which points to treating wh-conditionals as equatives, does not match their semantics. The equative analysis is discussed later in the chapter.

  9. 9.

    This is to assume that adverbs of quantification are able (at least sometimes) to quantify over individuals (eg. Lewis 1975). I will adopt this view for concreteness. The fact (to be shown in this subsection) that wh-conditionals do not exhibit real quantificational variability then suggests their antecedents are \(\sigma \)-closed. There is another approach that treats quantificational adverbs as exclusively (in any context) quantifying over situations (eg. Heim 1990; von Fintel 2004; Elbourne 2005). But in the situation-approach, we still need to distinguish between whether it is an indefinite in the restriction \(Q_{adv}[\lambda s.\exists x\ldots ][\lambda s.\ldots ]\) or a definite \(Q_{adv}[\lambda s.\sigma x\ldots ][\lambda s.\ldots ]\) (these two presumably have different behaviors). The discussion in this subsection according to this view can be taken to suggest that wh-conditionals belong to the latter category.

  10. 10.

    Typical Mandarin donkey sentences having indefinites in the antecedent and pronouns in the consequent behave the same:

    figure p
  11. 11.

    Being a variant of Dayal (1995), Hinterwimmer (2008) takes FRs (in the case of QVE) to denote kinds and propose that adverbs quantify over situations that contains realizations of the kind denoted by the FR. What we will say applies to such a proposal as well.

  12. 12.

    \(\lambda s_{\textsc {min}}.P(s)\) picks out the set of minimal situations that satisfy P. This and the extension relation \(\le \) presuppose a space of situations having a mereological structure (Kratzer 1989; Fine 2012).

  13. 13.

    To illustrate, a \(s_1\) where Zhangsan invites John is strictly smaller than a \(s_2\) where Zhangsan invites John and Mary, and both \(s_1\) and \(s_2\) satisfy \(\lambda s.\textsc {in}(\sigma x.\textsf {invite}(\textsf {zs},x,s),s)\). They satisfy the condition by being a situation where the individual(s) Zhangsan invites in that situation is in that situation.

  14. 14.

    The corresponding English FRs seem to behave the same. If that’s true, what I suggest below as an explanation to the contrast between (16) and (19) applies to English FRs as well.

    figure x
  15. 15.

    English FRs seem to behave the same: whichever two win the game should buy me a drink presupposes that there will be exactly two winners.

  16. 16.

    In (31), I suppress the situation variable (motivated in the previous subsection to handle adverbs of quantification) in the absence of adverbial quantifiers. I also treat na liang.ge.ren ‘which two.cl.persons’ in the consequent as an unanalyzed variable X. We could also take the consequent-na liang.ge.ren to be \(X\wedge \textsf {2.persons}(X)\), in which case the entire consequent will come out as \(\lambda X.\textsf {invite}(\textsf {ls},X)\wedge \textsf {2.persons}(X)\) and the resulting wh-conditional \(\textsf {invite}(\textsf {L},\sigma X.(\textsf {invite}(\textsf {zs},X)\wedge 2.\textsf {persons}(X)))\wedge \textsf {2.persons}(\sigma X.(\textsf {invite}(\textsf {zs},X)\wedge 2.\textsf {persons}(X)))\). Since the second conjunct of this truth-condition is vacuously true, this is equivalent to (31).

  17. 17.

    We write \(\sigma x.P(x)\) for \(\sigma (\lambda x.P(x))\) and don’t distinguish sets and their characteristic functions. We also use: and . to enclose presuppositions (Heim and Kratzer 1998).

  18. 18.

    Actually the consequent also carries uniqueness: (28) presupposes that Lisi invites exactly 2 persons. This cannot be captured by the correlative analysis sketched in this subsection, but is related to the exhaustive flavor to be discussed in Sect. 5.4.6.

  19. 19.

    I thank Simon Charlow for asking me to be explicit about this.

  20. 20.

    For a dynamic analysis of uniqueness effects, see (Brasoveanu 2008).

  21. 21.

    For English existential free relatives, see Caponigro (2003), Sternefeld (2009), Hinterwimmer (2013), Chierchia and Caponigro (2013).

  22. 22.

    Chierchia and Caponigro (2013) makes this point for free relatives. To be fair, Caponigro (2003) discusses ways to constrain the distribution of existential free relatives. In particular, in Caponigro ’s analysis, free relatives are \(\lambda \)-abstracts/sets (with wh-words being set-restrictors) that undergo type-shift before combining with the matrix predicate. According to the ranking in Dayal (2004), existential shift is ranked lower than \(\sigma \)-shift, and thus existential free relatives are rare.

  23. 23.

    The point is also stressed in Cheng and Huang (1996: \(Sect.\,\)6.1) as motivation for not adopting a correlative analysis for wh-conditionals.

  24. 24.

    The judgment of (53-c) is not clear. I myself don’t like conjoining declarative clauses using yiji/haiyou; for me, a different and erqie has to be used, also shown in (53-c). In the literature, Lü (1980: 615) (page numbers from Lü 1998) says yiji can conjoin ‘clauses’, however, all of his examples use embedded questions. Finally, it seems that erqie (the one that conjoins clauses) is also able to participate in wh-conditionals, illustrated in (i).

    figure bb

    What is surprising about (i) is its interpretation. Instead of collecting all individuals that have headaches or vomit as in (52), erqie seems to instruct us to collect individuals that both have headaches and vomit (again, the judgment is not stable). Since my argument in the main text relies on interactions between wh-phrases and the two connectives he and yiji/haiyou, I leave how erqie works and its interaction with wh-conditionals to another occasion.

  25. 25.

    Lin works within the unselective binding paradigm, so he can talk about assignments of values to the whs in a wh-conditional and whether they co-refer. In the terms of a FR-based equative analysis where the wh-phrases are relative pronouns, the observation is that the antecedent and the consequent do not always co-refer.

  26. 26.

    Hermione-Ron and Harry-Ginny are couples in Harry Potter.

  27. 27.

    I thank an anonymous reviewer for SALT 26 for providing me with this example. The scenario in (56-b) (with the names N. Chomsky, M.A.K Halliday, Danny Fox, and J. R. Martin) is also due to the reviewer. Note that M.A.K Halliday and J. R. Martin are presumably famous functional syntacticians. Mary and John are assumed to be two random linguists, one a generative linguist, the other a functionalist.

  28. 28.

    I thank Veneeta Dayal and Ivano Caponigro for discussion of this. My explanation of the asymmetry differs from how they would pursue the issue. Roughly, they would like to have a pragmatic story, where the antecedent and the consequent have different status in the information structure— for example, the entire antecedent could occupy a topic position, which might explain why it cannot be questioned. The explanation I will adopt however is a semantic one, which relies on the intuition that the consequent of a wh-conditional depends on its antecedent. Since you can answer a question by specifying what it depends on but not what it results in, the asymmetry (58)–(59) is explained. Details follow.

  29. 29.

    Lin’s bare conditionals are just our wh-conditionals.

  30. 30.

    The term ‘asymmetric’ has to be read loosely, not in its mathematical sense where an asymmetric relation R is such that\(\forall a, b(R(a,b)\rightarrow \lnot R(b,a))\). ‘depend on’ in the mathematical sense is neither symmetric nor asymmetric.

  31. 31.

    I thank Gennaro Chierchia for urging me to explore this idea.

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  1. School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan, China

    Mingming Liu

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Liu, M. (2018). Mandarin wh-Conditionals: Challenges and Facts. In: Varieties of Alternatives. Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, vol 3. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6208-7_5

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