A Contrastive Study On The English If-Conditionals And Chinese Ruguo-Conditionals

In English, the language form of sufficient condition judgement is mainly expressed by if-conditionals while in Chinese, the corresponding form is usually the ruguo-conditionals. Scholars from home and abroad have paid much attention on the classification and syntactic structure of the conditionals. This paper tries to study the English and Chinese conditionals from a new approach, that is the research based on the prototype theory. Then conditionals will be classified into prototypical and nonprototypical conditionals. Respective comparison will show the similarities and differences between English and Chinese conditionals. Moreover, reasons for the similarities and differences will be explained and analyzed.Various semantic relations between main clause and subordinate clause in conditionals demonstrate one important feature of conditionals, that is polysemia. Meanwhile, the prototype theory is regarded quite powerful in explaining polysemia. Therefore, according to the prototype theory and definition of conditionals, firstly, this paper finds out the attributes of the prototypical conditionals which include sufficient condition between main and subordinate clause, causal relations, truth correspondence and semantic correlation, certain order that subordinate clause is before the main clause. Prototypical conditionals found out according to these attributes mainly fall into two types—real and unreal conditionals, which is similar both in English and Chinese except for the fact that the distinction in Chinese prototypical ruguo-conditionals are not so clear as in English prototypical if-conditionals which can be easily divided based on the tense back-shift. However, Chinese prototypical conditionals can utilize the time deixis words and the change of the aspect to express the subjunctive mood. Moreover, Chinese prototypical conditionals can’t distinguish habitual conditionals and predictive conditionals for the lack of corresponding modal verb like "will".In the category of conditionals, there are also many members deviating from the prototype attributes and becoming the nonprototypical members. It is the mutual character in both languages’conditionals. Ungenuine conditions can be the conditions because of the fuzziness in people’s mind and the same cognitive mechanism—metonymy. The whole speech act is replaced by the content of the speech act. However, English if-conditionals have only one form of conjunction "if whereas Chinese ruguo-conditionals need two forms of conjunction:ruguo and ruguoshuo.There are prototypical and nonprototypical members which are derived from the prototype in both if-conditionals and ruguo-conditionals. This is the genaral character in two languages. On the other hand, differences between if-conditionals and ruguo-conditionals also exist in many aspects, such as connectives and word orders. It is a research based on a new explanation and analysis, which hopefully can make conditionals deeply learned and understood.