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Proposal-B: wh-Conditionals as Interrogative Dependency

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Varieties of Alternatives

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

Abstract

We have been trying to categorize wh-conditionals as a type of real conditional, with the standard assumption that conditionals denote relations between propositions. In this chapter, we will develop an alternative analysis, where the conditional status of wh-conditionals is (almost) given up.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The two full answers—Zhangsan invited John and Mary and Lisi invited John and Mary—are obviously not equivalent.

  2. 2.

    I thank Gennaro Chierchia for sharing with me a letter from Ede Zimmermann to Ivano Carponigro, where I found this argument. A more formal version of the argument appears in Zimmermann (1985: Sect. 5). The original argument is directed at Groenendijk and Stokhof’s analysis, but it carries over to any sets-of-propositions account, including the standard Hamblin-Karttunen one.

  3. 3.

    This is exactly what Heim (1994) proposes at the end of that paper. However it seems that this part of Heim’s proposal has not been picked up in the literature.

  4. 4.

    This point is already noted in footnote 13 of Rooth (1985: p.85). A through discussion appears in Zimmermann (2016). Another possible solution to the hyper-intensionality problem is to use property theory (Chierchia 1984), suggested by Rooth.

  5. 5.

    Thanks to Simon Charlow for discussion of this point.

  6. 6.

    This way of forming \(\langle \mathsf {F,B} \rangle \) is suggested in Rooth (1996). A different way that projects \(\langle \mathsf {F,B} \rangle \) from the focused item all the way up is proposed in Krifka (1992).

  7. 7.

    (27) uses a formulation of dependency different from Ciardelli’s (2016b), both of which are shown below.

    figure z

    Unfortunately I am at the current stage unable to give a proper comparison of the two, partly because Ciardelli uses an entirely different semantic framework—inquisitive semantics. What is important for our purposes is that (1-b) works well for wh-conditionals, and I remain silent on whether it should be used as a representation of dependency relations in general.

  8. 8.

    In general, I will leave for future investigation wh-conditionals with multiple pairs of whs. Related literature includes correlatives with multiple whs (Dayal 1996; Bittner 2001; Gajewski 2008), and multiple constituent questions (see Dayal 2016: Sect. 4 and references cited therein).

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

    Mingming Liu

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Liu, M. (2018). Proposal-B: wh-Conditionals as Interrogative Dependency. In: Varieties of Alternatives. Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, vol 3. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6208-7_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6208-7_7

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