Wide Scope and Interpretation of why
Experimental Evidence for Causal Interrogatives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18148/zs/2026-2003Schlagwörter:
why-question, intervention effect, multiple wh-question, non-interrogative meaningAbstract
This paper reports three experiment studies investigating the unique syntactic and interpretive properties of the why-adjunct in Mandarin Chinese in comparison to other wh-types. The empirical findings are: (i) Mandarin why-questions demonstrate a different intervention effect from other whquestions; (ii) multiple wh-sentences with the causal interrogative phrase paired with additional interrogative phrases yield interpretations that are notably less natural than those with other wh-phrases; and (iii) why-questions lack non-interrogative uses, such as free-choice or indefinite meanings. These results converge in showing that the causal adjunct exhibits an exceptional wide scope, consistent with one prominent line of theoretical research.
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The stimuli lists used in the three experiments of our survey research, as well as a description of the complete statistical analysis and the R code scripts, are stored privately in the OSF repository. We plan to make them accessible in the event that the manuscript is accepted for publication.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Dawei Jin, Jun Chen
Dieses Werk steht unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International.
The article is published in Diamond Open Access (DOA) format, under the CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
