A Study Of Chinese Counterfactual If-Conditionals From A Cognitive Perspective

Counterfactual reasoning appears to be a universal phenomenon of human inference; counterfactual and hypothetical thought is pervasive in our daily lives. Study of counterfactuals (CFs for short) abroad interests philosophers, psychologists, linguists, logicians so much that it has been a main field for them to probe, and much more achievements have been gained. From Lewis's (1973) possible world semantics for the interpretation of counterfactuals, till recently the more perfect interpretation in terms of cognitive theory, the decades have seen its flourish. Nevertheless , probes into CFs in Chinese are rather rare, one possible reason may lies in that, Mandarin Chinese lacks syntactic features to express counterfactuality. This paper attempts to explain how people construct and understand counterfactual conditionals in Mandarin Chinese in terms of cognitive theory. Based on previous researches by陈国华(1988),蒋严(1998),邢福义(1993), Dancygier & Sweetser (2005), Fauconnier(1985/1994,1997), Fauconnier & Turner (2002) and Coulson(2001) etc., we propose that suppositives which introduce conditionals in Chinese also evoke the set-ups of mental spaces, against which the main clauses can be evaluated, following Dancygier & Sweetser (2005) in terms of mental space theory. Chinese counterfactuals are more dependent upon contexts, the typical counterfactual conditionals are introduced by suppositives such as如果,要不是,若非,etc.. In addition to these, Chinese does have its own characteristics in introducing counterfactual conditionals, mainly with the aid of such devices as temporal references, aspect markers, negators and rhetorical interrogatives. We'll claim that these devices are also able to help evoke the set-ups of mental spaces. It comes to a conclusion that interpretation of counterfactual if-spaces from the cognitive perspective is very convincing and that Chinese counterfactual if-conditionals are very different from their English counterparts in terms of linguistic realization. By analyzing Chinese counterfactual conditionals from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics, this research broadens the application of Cognitive Linguistics in analyzing linguistic phenomena in Mandarin Chinese.