A Study On Presuppositions Of Chinese Marked Ounterfactual Conditionals

Presupposition has long been centered in the field of linguistics, and studies onpresupposition triggers are comparatively less, microscopic studies of a certain kind ofpresupposition trigger still cann’t be found. Under Possible World Semantics, this thesisresearches CMCC from the following aspects: the triggering of presupposition of CMCC, therelationship between presupposition and truth-conditions of CMCC, presupposition ofcounterfactual conditionals and counterfactual thinking. The major findings of this researchare as follows:First and foremost, the presupposition of a CMCC is triggered by the following fourfactors: the semantic meaning of “ruguo”, when its antecedent is situated, the semanticcomplementary relationship between the affirmative form and negative form of its antecedent,and the semantic complementary relationship between “hold” and “not hold”. Thepresupposition of a CMCC is more closely related with its antecedent.Secondly, since there are three truth conditions of a CMCC: the antecedent of acounterfactual conditional holds in the possible worlds; possible worlds are mostly correlatedwith the actual world; the consequent of a counterfactual conditional holds in the possibleworlds. And the presupposition of a CMCC is the most important factor helping to confirmpossible worlds most similar to the actual world.Lastly, Alfred F. Bloom (20-98) holds that Chinese speakers are less competent atcounterfactual thinking than English speakers, because there is no grammatical structure(subjunctive mood) signaling counterfactuality in Chinese counterfactual conditionals, whichis contrary to the findings of this thesis. Like English conditionals, Chinese conditionalsconstist of factual conditionals and counterfactual conditionals, a Chinese counterfactualconditional can trigger the same presupposition as that of a corresponding Englishcounterfactual conditional, and Chinese conditionals semantically equal to Englishconditionals, which demonstrates that the competence of counterfactual thinking is notdirectly related with linguistic structures in the language. And this research also supports theweak version of linguistic relativity.