A Cognitive Study Of The Unreal Conditionals In English

The concept “unreal”,counterfactual or hypothetical,is the result of categorization and conceptualization of the counterfactual thinking which is a pervasive cognitive activity of human beings,and expresses the counterfactual meaning.Cognitive linguistics believes that the language structure corresponds to the conceptual structure.So it is acceptable that there are numerous sentences in English which can express the counterfactual meaning.Within those sentences,the unreal conditionals are the most typical one and is in a large number.Many scholars have conducted relevant studies on this topic from different perspectives,mainly from the philosophical view,the syntactic view and the cognitive view.Though previous studies have made many achievements which have valuable guidance to the latter studies on this topic,there are still some room for improvement.Previous studies mainly focus on the conditional sentences with grammatical markers like the backshifting of tense,but fail to give sufficient explanation to the conditional sentences without grammatical markers.Also,the earlier scholars are not able to explain what prototypical and non-prototypical unreal conditionals in English are,and also cannot give a systematic and comprehensive study to different types of unreal conditionals in English.Inspired by the prototype theory,the three domains theory,and the subjectification theory,this thesis attempts to study the unreal conditionals in English from the cognitive view to deal with the following questions:(1)How are the unreal conditionals in English generated and expanded?(2)What are the prototypical and the non-prototypical unreal conditionals in English?(3)How does the cognitive mechanism of subjectification work to reflect subjectivity in the prototypical and the non-prototypical unreal conditionals in English?The study finds that the unreal conditionals in English are generated by mapping the concept of the unreal condition into the language world with the typical structural form “ If p,(then)q”.The concept of the unreal condition refers to the subjectively assumed causative relation between events which are not unlikely to happen or cannot happen,which actually expresses the counterfactual meaning.As a category,the unreal conditionals must undergo an expansion process from the prototype to the non-prototypes which is motivated by subjectivity.The prototype is the content unreal conditionals in English,with the features of the direct causative relation between the protasis and the apodosis,and of the backshifting of the tense.The non-prototypes are the epistemic unreal conditionals and the speech-act unreal conditionals in English with the features of the indirect conditional relation between the protasis and the apodosis,and of that the tense backshifting is not always presented.Between these two non-prototypes,the speech-act unreal conditionals have more peripheral status for they share higher subjectivity,and belong to the peripheral member.In the unreal conditionals in English,the cognitive mechanism,subjectification,works to reflect subjectivity,and causes that the prototype and the non-prototypes of the unreal conditionals in English present some differences and common grounds in the semantic,syntactic and pragmatic levels.At the semantic level,direct causative relation lies in the content unreal conditionals,while the epistemic and speech-act unreal conditionals rest upon the indirect and implicit relation.In the epistemic unreal conditionals,the semantic relation can be viewed as reasoning relation,while in the speech-act unreal conditionals,the conditional relation exists only in the cognitive level,which reflects the relation between the speech acts presented in the protasis and the apodosis but the propositions described in the protasis and the apodosis.In syntactic level,the backshifting of tense and strict temporal sequence of verb forms are presented in the content unreal conditionals,and the clause order always follows the typical sequence “if p,(then)q”.While in the epistemic and speech-act unreal conditionals,both verb forms and clause order are more free in form,especially in the speech-act unreal conditionals,the backshifting of tense and the strict temporal sequence of verb forms almost disappear.At the pragmatic level,all the types unreal conditionals carry some pragmatic intentions.This study conducted on the unreal conditionals in English has not only proved the explanatory power of the cognitive theories on human language,but also provided some valuable reference to the acquisition,teaching and usage of the unreal conditionals in English.