If-Conditionals And Stereotype

This dissertation is a study of English if-conditionals within a cognitive framework integrated with a logical-pragmatic perspective. The objectives of this research are twofold: (1) to explore the motivation of the fossilization of English if-conditional construction on the basis of the survey of its polysemy; and (2) to put forward an inferential mechanism with regard to the interpretation of English if-conditionals in terms of the graft of the application of stereotype onto that of logical sufficient conditionality. If-conditional in this study refers to a complex sentence whose typical surface structure is a bi-clause consisting of a subordinate clause and a main clause in the form of if p, then q. The conditional has long been extensively studied from different perspectives such as logic, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, with the result of a rich literature to show that significant insights have been gained in different aspects through various approaches. However, less investigation has been made on the motivation of the formation of the construction than its significant merits; to put it plainly, less attention has been directed to the investigation of the grammaticalizational aspect of the construction in which diversified semantic contents might be accepted during the process of its fossilization. This thesis is an attempt made toward this investigation. From the point of view of cognitive linguistics, language structure is mainly the result of the mapping of the constructs and relations of the real world onto the use of language through the medium of human cognition. In the course of perceiving the world, people tend to turn relations into stereotypes through their construal, and the use of stereotypes will be unavoidably permeated into or will, to some extent, affect the process and product of the description and interpretation of the states of affairs. This should finally be reflected in the organization of linguistic structure. The construction if p, then q is no exception in that this construction reflects the mapping of the human perception and consideration of the conditional relations between events of the real world. These as the common knowledge shared by the community of the language, even by communities across cultures, reflect people's general understanding of the world in terms of causes and effects between events, thus forming a kind of social sub-consciousness and unconsciousness of the community or even over communities. In this sense, it is the stereotype that motivates the formation, or put in another way, the grammaticalization, of conditional construction. Nurtured by the perspective of cognitive linguistics and enlightened by the research on stereotype, this dissertation makes a wide-scale investigation into the question of what makes it possible for everyday conditionals to transmit the chameleon-like meanings and what inferences they license. The investigation may be boiled down into the following key question together with the several sub-questions: The key question is: why can the contents without conditional relations fall into the conditional construction if p, then q? This question is actually a question concerning the grammaticalization of the construction. The sub-questions are: (1) How does if p, then q construction accept the various contents and how might the various contents be described? (2) How do we account for the trigger of the most specific interpretation of a specific conditional? (3) How do we account for the process of the fossilization of the construction? The conditional is logically the linguistic form of hypothetical judgment of sufficient condition. The stereotype embedded in the contents may cause a change of transmutation in the sufficient condition expressed, changing the original hypothetical judgment of sufficient condition to some extent. Accordingly, both logical rule and stereotype conspire to make contribution to the transmuted inference. The polysemy of if-conditional construction, or its diversified interpretations, is in the final analysis a res...