<i>Wh</i> -conditionals are more interrogative than not

Abstract The observation that wh -expressions in a lot of languages can be interpreted either interrogatively or non-interrogatively has led to the widely accepted thesis that wh -expressions originate as variables, with their interpretations determined through being bound by a question operator or other non-interrogative operators ( Cheng 1991 , Li 1992 , Tsai 1994 , Cheng &amp; Huang 1996 , among others). However, recent studies on a specific non-interrogative wh-construction in Mandarin, known as “ wh -conditionals,” challenge this variable-binding approach ( Liu 2016 , 2017 , Xiang 2016 , 2020 , Li 2021 ). In wh -conditionals, two wh -clauses are connected to express a conditional meaning. These studies advocate for a question-based approach, proposing that the meaning of wh -conditionals stems from interrogative meaning rather than variable binding. As a result, the question-based approach predicts that wh -conditionals should be linguistically closer to wh -questions than to other non-interrogative wh -constructions. This paper confirms the prediction using wh -constructions in Khorchin Mongolian. Despite their distinct theoretical commitments, the two approaches can be reconciled to address challenges pointed out by Cheng &amp; Huang (2020) , Pan &amp; Kuang (2023) , and Tsai (2023) to the question-based view.