Lecture | Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
Composing alternative questions without disjunctions: Insights from Mandarin Chinese
- Date
- Thursday 15 October 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.03
Abstract
In English, a disjunctive question such as Does Anna like coffee or tea? can ask whether Anna likes either beverage or which one she likes. These polar and alternative readings are distinguished in part by intonation (see Biezma & Rawlins 2015 for a review). Many languages are reported to use different disjunctions in these two environments (Haspelmath 2007). Mandarin Chinese is commonly taken to exemplify this pattern: huozhe is analyzed as standard disjunction, forming disjunctive propositions, and haishi as interrogative disjunction, forming alternative questions (see Erlewine 2025 for a recent analysis).
In this talk, I challenge this characterization of Mandarin. I present new empirical challenges to treating haishi as a disjunction and propose instead that it is an adverb encoding mutual exclusivity. On this account, Mandarin alternative questions are formed by juxtaposition rather than disjunctive coordination (Chao 1955). The analysis predicts that the alternatives in Mandarin alternative questions are clausal in size, a prediction for which I provide empirical evidence. I also discuss how the account explains, among other things, the conditions under which haishi can be omitted, the optionality of the particle shi, the mutual exclusivity presupposition of alternative questions.
This analysis raises a broader question: must alternative questions contain disjunctions at all? I argue that disjunction is not a necessary ingredient of their syntax or semantics. Yet their recurrent connection still calls for an explanation. I therefore return to English and other languages where standard and interrogative disjunction share the same morphological form. I consider what underlies this shared form and how it relates to the Mandarin pattern, with broader implications for cross-linguistic variation in alternative-question formation.
This is joint work with Mingming Liu (Tsinghua University).