Wide Scope and Interpretation of why
Experimental Evidence for Causal Interrogatives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18148/zs/2026-2003Keywords:
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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Data Availability Statement
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
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The article is published in Diamond Open Access (DOA) format, under the CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
