Mandarin wh-conditionals as interrogative conditionals

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.