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Jiang, Yan (2019) 'Ways for expressing counterfactual conditionals in Mandarin Chinese.' Linguistics Vanguard, 5 (S3). p. 20190009.

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Abstract

This paper discusses the ways in which Mandarin Chinese expresses counterfactual conditionals, and endeavours to motivate and theorize the use of such strategies. I aim to give an overall picture of Mandarin Chinese counterfactual conditionals, a topic which has hitherto not been covered in the Chinese linguistic literature. The strategies identified are the use of special lexicalized chunks to directly encode counterfactual meaning; the creation of tense mismatch and the accompanying counterfactual meaning, either through the use of relative tense pointing toward a hypothetical past event, or through the use of some special time adverbs; and the use of pure inference over conditionals with impossible or absurd antecedents. Overlaying these strategies is the presence of context-dependent simplifications, which may prompt the language user to omit the defining features of a given strategy.

Item Type: Journal Article
Keywords: counterfactual; conditional; Mandarin Chinese; inference
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > School of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics > Department of Linguistics
ISSN: 2199174X
Copyright Statement: ©2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. This is the published version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0009
Date Deposited: 11 Feb 2019 13:58
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/30368
Related URLs: https://www.deg ... /view/j/lingvan (Publisher URL)

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