Analysis Of Unreal If-conditionals Under The Framework Of Goldberg’s Construction Grammar

As a significant part of English grammar, unreal if-conditionals, orcounterfactual conditionals, or subjunctive conditionals as they are often termed, areessential in English teaching and learning. In traditional grammar, unreal if-conditionals have been analyzed with concentration on their special forms, especiallyon verb forms. If-conditionals have also been researched in cognitive linguisticstudies and it has been made clear how people construct meaning in cognition.However, for EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, the difficulties inproducing unreal if-conditionals are not solved. EFL learners not only need tounderstand the meaning of a grammatical sentence, but also need to make or createnew sentences by themselves. Therefore, attention should be paid to both forms andmeanings.In this thesis, the author adopts Goldberg’s construction grammar approach toanalyze the mechanism of English unreal if-conditionals. Firstly, the status of unrealif-conditionals as a kind of construction is proved through the analysis of therelationship between meanings of unreal if-conditionals and meanings of theircomponent parts “if” and “past tense”. The unreal if-conditional structure fitsGoldberg’s definition of “construction”—a form-function pairing. Then, theinteractive relation between the unreal if-conditional construction and its corecomponent, past tense, is illustrated through examples. Finally, the present study findsout that unreal if-conditional construction can be regarded as the non-prototypicalmember of if-conditionals while real conditionals are the prototypical member.Aims of the present study are: firstly, to explore the underlying mechanisminvolved in the formation of unreal if-conditional forms and their correspondentmeanings so as to facilitate learners’ understanding and use of unreal if-conditionals;secondly, to provide possible methods for classroom teaching of unreal if-conditionalconstructions and to prove that construction grammar studies are usage-based.Besides, Goldberg’s construction grammar is theoretically extended to some degree.For the convenience of data collection, unreal if-conditionals in this thesis onlyrefer to those containing the conjunction “if” and with if-clauses in the initial position.The status of unreal if-conditionals as a set of constructions is proved before adetailed analysis is made. The two unreal if-conditional constructions, namely “If+ Simple Past, B” and “If+Past Perfect, B” are identified based on the classificationsdone by previous researchers and an detailed analysis of the data collected from theonline Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) helps verify theappropriateness of this reclassification. The verb meaning in the construction isanalyzed and the integration of verb meaning with the construction meaning isdisplayed in the thesis. It is found during the research process that, though theconsequent of unreal if-conditionals may display various sentence structures, they canbe taken as one whole part in the present study because our focus is on the wholestructure in which the antecedent plays the crucial role. The consequent is dependenton the antecedent.The present thesis gives a clear picture of how unreal if-conditionals are formed,taking into account of both their forms and meanings. Meanwhile, it provides a newapproach to the study of unreal if-conditionals. A new possible teaching procedure issuggested in the end.