Primary Research On The Mechanism Of Meaning Construction Of Counterfactual Conditionals

Counterfactuals, usually termed as subjunctive sentences in traditional grammar, here literally means, country to the fact and they have been studied by many grammarians and linguists. In this paper, the counterfactual conditionals are described and research on their meaning construction process is made from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, especially on the theoretical basis of conceptual integration or blending.To chose this topic mainly there are these following reasons. First, cognitive linguistics is a new branch of or approach to language that has been flourished recently, with the approach of which it has innovation significance to analyze counterfactual conditionals. Counterfactual conditionals, as a kind of language phenomena, reflect certain way of thought or thinking during our daily life, that is counterfactual thinking. To understand the meaning is to construct the counterfactual thought. And conceptual integration, as a kind of meaning construction theory, has immense power for the explanation of language structure and meaning. So it is necessary and significant to adopt the theory of conceptual integration as its starting-point. And then, the structural, grammatical and semantic features of counterfactual conditionals are typical in English. Many linguists from the perspective of traditional way have studied counterfactual conditionals, so it is theoretical significance to analyze this language phenomenon with a new approach.According to the designing of this thesis, generally the qualitative analysis and introspective methods are adopted in this paper. With this methodology, the definition, features and meanings of counterfactual conditionals are described on the basis of many linguistic facts. And then, following the introduction of conceptual integration, the meaning construction process of counterfactual conditionals is studied. In this paper, the discussion is accompanied by many examples that are selected from the typical grammar textbooks and some classical works.From the perspective of conceptual integration, meaning construction refers to the high-level, complex mental operations that apply within and across domains when we think, act or communicate. To obtain meaning, it is needed to connect all the spaces or domains that are like a network. Generally, during this process the basic network includes four mental spaces:two input spaces, a generic space and a blended space. Its essence of the operation is to construct a partial match between input mental spaces and to project selectively form those inputs into a blended mental space, which dynamically develops emergent structure. During this series of operation process, the process of meaning construction is governed by some principles and as a result the networks are built up. With the discussion of these principles and networks, the analysis of meaning construction of counterfactual conditionals is made. The key to get the meaning is to obtain the blended counterfactual space, which is produced on the basis of the grammatical form of the sentence that prompts us to look for a mapping from a very partial aspect of the real situation onto a counterfactual one. After a careful and concrete study, it is concluded that there are mainly three kinds of integration networks, that is single frame network, one-sided network and two-sided network.On the whole, the goal of this paper is to specify the meaning construction of counterfactual conditionals, their operations, and domains and how they are reflected in language. The significance of this paper is that the vivid process of meaning construction behind the'iceberg'of counterfactual conditionals is shown. Meanwhile, it provided a new perspective for the study of counterfactual conditionals and also it is a starting-pointing for the further research in this field. And also it is significant for a deeper understanding of counterfactual conditionals and for their teaching in China.