The Syntactical Realization Of Irrealis In Modern Chinese

This paper is a study on Irrealis in modern Chinese, namely on how Irrealis is expressed syntactically in Chinese. As a crosslinguistic universal category, Irrealis is more conclusive and in higher level. It's embodied in World's languages and shows great universalities. There are some discrepancies among languages but as a semantic-syntactic category, it's quite understandable. Based on this concept, this paper thoroughly researches the syntactical realization of Irrealis in Chinese. We at first analyze its semantical sub-categories and conclude different Irrealis types with different typicality. Then the forms of Irrealis are explored. We also explore all kinds of future tenses and their status in Irrealis. At the end of the paper, we point out the issues to be addressed in the future. There are seven chapters in this paper.Chapter one is introduction. It introduces the definition of Irrealis, the characteristics of linguistic categorization, the significance of Irrealis study and this paper's approach and theoretical background. Linguistic category has its universalities and its discrepancies among languages, but it can no be the reason to deny the existence of the category. Irrealis is no exception. In the previous syntactic study, we didn't pay enough attention to the influence of Irrealis. We should re-examine some syntactical conclusions if Irrealis is taken into account. This is the significance of Irrealis study. Because Irrealis is a semantical-syntactical category, we adopt from meaning to form and then back to meaning approach, with Typology as our perspective and Cognitive Linguistics as our theoretical background through out our study.Chapter two discusses the typological status of Irrealis and its difference and connection with other terms. Its discrepancies in languages can't negate its typological status. There is a close connection between Irrealis study and Modality study as we can see that many terminologies of Irrealis come from Modality study. Strictly speaking, the scope of target of Irrealis is wider than the modality's. Semantically, it's acceptable to consider Irrealis as a kind of modality. But Irrealis is more circumscribed. Irrealis is also different from Subjunctive mood, especially on syntactical aspect. Since Irrealis is a semantical-syntactical category, it can be considered as a bigger category than Subjunctive mood. This chapter also introduces the debate on whether Chinese has counter-factual category in Chinese linguistics...