Ways for expressing counterfactual conditionals in Mandarin Chinese

Jiang, Yan

Abstract

This paper discusses the ways in which Mandarin Chinese expresses counterfactual conditionals, and endeavours to motivate and theorize the use of such strategies. I aim to give an overall picture of Mandarin Chinese counterfactual conditionals, a topic which has hitherto not been covered in the Chinese linguistic literature. The strategies identified are the use of special lexicalized chunks to directly encode counterfactual meaning; the creation of tense mismatch and the accompanying counterfactual meaning, either through the use of relative tense pointing toward a hypothetical past event, or through the use of some special time adverbs; and the use of pure inference over conditionals with impossible or absurd antecedents. Overlaying these strategies is the presence of context-dependent simplifications, which may prompt the language user to omit the defining features of a given strategy.

Citation

Jiang, Y. (2019). Ways for expressing counterfactual conditionals in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistics Vanguard: A Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences, 5(S3), Article 20190009. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0009

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 3, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Jul 11, 2019
• Publication Date: Jul 1, 2019
• Deposit Date: Feb 11, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 11, 2019
• Journal: Linguistics Vanguard: A Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences
• Electronic ISSN: 2199-174X
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 5
• Issue: S3
• Article Number: 20190009
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0009
• Keywords: counterfactual; conditional; Mandarin Chinese; inference
• Related Public URLs: https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lingvan