Impacts Of Counterfactual Ingredients Upon The Construal Of Counterfactual Meanings In Chinese Hypothetical Conditionals

The construal of counterfactual meanings is a universal cognitive activity of human beings.Counterfactual meaning is the meaning contrary to the real world or ones'subjective knowledge.However,it differentiates in linguistic representations across different language types.Unlike Indo-European languages,there are no distinct grammatical markers to explicate counterfactual meanings in hypothetical conditional sentences in Mandarin Chinese,but different counterfactual ingredients,when necessary,can help the conditional sentence generate counterfactual meanings.Due to this linguistic representation feature,it was once even been questioned on the counterfactual thinking ability of native Chinese.In recent years,with the rapid development of cognitive science,how people construe counterfactual meanings has become a hot issue in cognitive studies abroad.However,the languages that have been observed are mainly Indo-European languages,rather than Mandarin Chinese,which is unique in its counterfactual linguistic representations.The present study examines how counterfactual ingredients influence the construal of counterfactual meanings in Chinese hypothetical conditionals by drawing on psycholinguistic experimental methods.With the help of questionnaire tests and eye tracking experiments,two aspects of the construal of counterfactual meanings,namely,construal results and construal processes are explored respectively.Seven of the most typical Mandarin Chinese counterfactual ingredients are selected to be observed in the present study.Considering the coverage of different grammatical levels of the ingredients,the questions we want to answer are as follow:?1?Do compound sentence patterns have impacts upon the construal of counterfactual meanings??2?Do protasis propositional contents have impacts upon the construal of counterfactual meanings??3?Do the lexical counterfactual ingredients?hypothetical conjunctions,the temporal word“dangshi”,the modal partical“le₂”,the modal adverb“zhende”and“dehua”?have impacts upon the construal of counterfactual meanings?To answer these questions,counterfactual ingredients are divided into four groups and are investigated into through eight experiments.For each group,the question about construal results is answered through one questionnaire test and the question about construal processes is answered through one eye tracking experiment.The questionnaire tests are designed to find out that under what conditions and to what extent,each counterfactual ingredient has impacts upon the construal results of counterfactual meanings,while the eye tracking experiments are designed to find out when each counterfactual ingredient has impacts upon the construal processes of counterfactual meanings.All the above experients are conducted by the manipulation of the level of counterfactual ingredients and the level of counterfactuality of protasis propositional contents?neutral,highly counterfactual?in hypothetical conditionals.Major findings are as below:Firstly,in hypothetical conditionals,compound sentence patterns had impacts upon the construal results of counterfactual meanings.It made people construe a higher level of the counterfactuality of the sentence.The impact was more significant when the propositional content was neutral than it did when the propositional content was highly counterfactual.Compound sentence patterns had impacts upon the construal processes of counterfactual meanings,in both early and late processing periods.It made the sentences easier to be processed.Secondly,the counterfactual degree of the protasis propositional content had impacts upon the construal results of counterfactual meanings.The higher the counterfactual degree of the protasis propositional content,the higher the counterfactual degree of the sentence was construed.Both neutral and high counterfactual degree of the protasis propositional content had impacts on the construal processes of counterfactual meanings.The former one was caused by being contrary to the real world while the latter one being ambiguous and unpredictable.Thirdly,in hypothetical conditionals,the lexical counterfactual ingredients had different impacts upon the construal of counterfactual meanings:The hypothetical conjunctions with different levels of counterfactuality only showed a tendency to affect the construal results of a compound sentence when the propositional content was neutral.The hypothetical conjunction“jiaru”had a tendency to make the sentences to be construed with a higher counterfactual degree than“ruguo”.It didn't have impacts upon the construal processes of counterfactual meanings.The temporal word“dangshi”and the modal partical“le₂”had impacts upon the construal results of counterfactual meanings only when the propositional content was neutral.It was construed with a higher counterfactual degree of the sentence,but not as high as the one in high counterfactual degree sentences.Neither the temporal word“dangshi”nor the modal partical“le₂”had impacts on the construal processes of counterfactual meanings.The modal adverb“zhende”had a tendency of making the sentence to be construed with a higher couterfactual degree as the construal results of counterfactual meanings only when the propositional content was neutral and the sentence was without“dehua”.The dependent conjunction“dehua”didn't have impacts upon the construal results of counterfactual meanings Neither the modal adverb“zhende”nor the dependent conjunction“dehua”had impacts upon the construal processes of counterfactual meanings.