A Corpus-based Cognitive Typologica Study Of English And Chinese Marked Hypothesis Complex Sentences

Hypothesis complex sentences refer to two sub-clauses that have suppositional relation between assumption and result.The first sub-clause,hypothetical assumption,means that there is a situation imagined;and the second sub-clause,hypothetical result,which is caused by the hypothetical assumption.It is known that the hypothesis complex sentences widely exist in each of human languages though they vary from language to language.So far,it has been researched by lots of scholars at home and abroad from different perspectives,such as syntactic,semantics,pragmatics,and translation.However,studying the implicational universals and priority sequences of hypothesis complex sentences from cognitive linguistic typology is mentioned inadequately.This paper attempts to find out the typological characteristics on English and Chinese hypothesis complex sentences and explain them used by the cognitive theories.Theoretically,the cognitive theories are regarded as the theoretical framework;on the research methods,incorporating data description and motivation explanation conducts a cross-language analysis.In order to meet the research design,the author retrieved and extracted hypothesis complex sentences material from four corpora,such as TIME Magazine Corpus,The Independent Corpus,CCL,and CCUC.Among them,the English materials consists of 14215sentences involving 5930 complex sentences with hypothetical marker and the Chinese materials consists of 9937 sentences involving 4931 complex sentences with hypothetical marker.The research of this paper on English and Chinese hypothesis complex sentences mainly aimed on three aspects.First and foremost is the classification from three categories,such as logical semantics,syntactic and markers.Secondly,the author tried to find out the implicational universals and priority sequences of English and Chinese hypothesis complex sentences based on the classifications.On the view of logical semantics,the real hypothesis used more than irreal one and the deductive hypothesis is most while inverse-objective least,which were both implied in the English and Chinese hypothesis complex sentences.On view of syntactic,both English and Chinese hypothesis complex sentences imply preposition of hypothetical assumption,i.e.,the routine hypothesis used more than the variant ones.On view of markers,?1?the priority sequences in the perspective of logical semantics:in English,inverse-happened>inverse-unhappen>deductive>contrastive>inverse-objective,in Chinese,Deductive>inverse-happened>contrastive>inverse-objective>inverse-unhappen;?2?the priority sequences in the perspective of markers:in English,the priority sequence of markers comes as follow:for deductive are:when>unless>ortherwise₁>if₁>if…with;there is no priority sequence of markers for contrastive because of just one marker;the priority sequence of markers for inverse-happened are:or>if₃>but that>had I>except that>but for>otherwise₂;the priority sequence of markers for inverse-unhappen are:in by chance>if₄>once>in case of;the priority sequence of markers for inverse-objective are:if I were/was you…should/could/would+do>had done…should/could/would+have done.In Chinese,the priority sequence of markers comes as follow:for deductive are:??₁>??₁???>??₁;the priority sequence of markers for contrastive are:??₂>???>??₂;the priority sequence of markers for inverse-happened are:??>??₂>???₁>??₃;the priority sequence of markers for inverse-unhappen are:??>???₂>???>??;the priority sequence of markers for inverse-objective are:??₃>???₃.Thirdly,it is the cognitive explanation for the typological features.Human languages,as the output expression to understand the outer world,can be explained from the cognitive thought ways.With the research,it not only makes language learners know better the difference between English and Chinese hypothesis complex sentences,but also there is of great significance in promoting foreign Chinese teaching and second language acquisition.Last but not least,it can also provide further theoretical supports for the linguistic study.