A Study Of "If A Then B" Chinese Conditional Sentences Regarding Cognitive Linguistics

This paper uses the theory of cognitive linguistics such as the prototype, mental space and construction grammar theories from the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic perspectives of comprehensive, longxi conditional sentences in modern Chinese. In addition to the acknowledgment and the references, this paper is structured into five chapters.Chapter I: Literature Review This chapter presents the literature review of conditional sentences, which examines the latest research trends. This section focuses on studies of the theoretical and scientific researches of prototype, mental space, and structural grammar theories in cognitive linguistics in order to build the theoretical basis for the author’s research on conditional sentences in Chinese and Vietnamese languages.Chapter II: The categories of conditional sentences in modern Chinese.In this chapter, the author introduces the criteria to define a condition sentence and a typical conditional sentence. On this basis, all previously-presented conditional sentences are indentified, listed, and categorized.Chapter III: "If A then B" Chinese conditional sentencesThe statistical analysis justifies the popularity of "if A then B" type of conditional sentences. Afterwards, on the basis the semantic relationship between two clauses in a sentence, "if A then B" conditional sentences are again divided into sub-types. The matching degree of these single types against the typical sentences in terms of the form and the semantic characteristics are then analyzed and rated. Chapter III presents the results of this comparison and classification process.Chapter IV: Comparision and Contrast between "if A then B" conditional sentence in Chinese and the equivalent expressions in VietnameseThis chapter presents studies of existing Vietnamese researchers’ literature in this specific research area. Consequently, the research compares and contrasts the corresponding expressions between conditional sentences in Chinese and in Vietnamese to find the similarities and differences of them, in order to provide further reference documents to Chinese learners in Vietnam.Chapter V: Research’s findings and limitationsThis chapter summarizes the contributions of the research as well as its limitations. Due to the time constraints, some other Chinese conditional sentences are omitted or analyzed in details, which could worth further researches in the future.