The Study On The General Ineal Conditionals Of Modem Chinese

The object of the thesis is the general irreal conditionals in modernChinese. They are divided into content domain, epistemic domain andspeech-act domain. From the perspective of three domains, wedescribe them comprehensively and make a detailed observe of aseries of issues including the judgment and characteristic of eachdomain, temporality,reasoning features,syntactic representation as wellas their relation.Firstly, we identify our object of study. Conditionals, hypotheticalsentence and concessive sentence all belong to irreal sentences interms of the realistic of protasis. They are categorized into general irrealconditionals in the view of general condition. We apply the structuralistapproach to describe the elements of the sentence, the place of theconjunctions and word order.Secondly, we study the general irreal conditionals from theperspective of “Three Domains”. At the beginning, we set a few ofdistinctive features of three domains, we distinguish content domainbetween others by subjectivity and epistemic domain betweenspeech-act by illocutionary. Then, we study the temporality. Twoelements are of great important--the occurring time of events in protasisand apodosis as well as the narrative time. The former decides thejudgment of condition and coclusion while the latter decides the wordorder. In content domain, protasis is before apodosis. However, in theothers, apodosis is concluded by subjective reasoning, which means it must occur after the condition. So the occurri ng time of eventsbecomes less important, whi ch leads to more flexible word order. Afterthat, we study the reasoning features. It is the obj ective narration andobj ective reasoning i n content domain while subjective r easoning inthe other two. The main syntacti c representation of cont ent domainand speech-act domain are optative verb and modal adverbs, but inepistemic domain are optative verb, speculate adverb and cognitiveverb phrase.At last, we study the relation of the three domains. Subjectivity isincreasing from content domain to epistemic domain and speech-actdomain. The former one is the typical member of the conditionprototype and the latter two are atypical members.