Wh-Conditionals in Vietnamese and Chinese: Against Unselective Binding

Cheng and Huang (1996) refer to these conditionals as ‘bare conditionals’ because they usually lack the word ‘if’. However, this is not a general property of these conditionals cross-linguistically (or even in Chinese; see Lin 1996); we therefore refer to them as wh-conditionals. The defining property of these conditionals is that they must contain a matched pair of wh-phrases, one in the antecedent and one in the consequent, as illustrated in (1). The two wh-phrases are interpreted as the same variable, as indicated in the English translation.