On The Syntax And Semantics Of Chinese Counterfactual Conditionals

Counterfactual conditional is a striking and frequently commented on domain which the antecedent and consequent are contrary to the fact.Scholars at home and abroad describe and explain the counterfactual conditional from different perspectives,such as logical philosophy perspective,psychological perspective,linguistic perspective,etc.Based on the basis of previous studies,this thesis attempts to focus on syntactic approach to describe the syntactic properties,generation mechanism,and counterfactual interpretation of Chinese counterfactual conditional sentences to explore the syntactic-semantic interface relationship.Combined with the study of English counterfactual conditional sentences,a comparative study was conducted to find the similarities and differences between the two languages.Chinese counterfactual conditionals can be divided into explicit conditionals,implicit conditionals,and counter-possible Conditionals.Chinese counterfactual conditionals have significant syntactic features.Firstly,hypothetical conjunctions play an important role in the formation of CCFs,such as "yaobushi,ruguo bushi." Secondly,CCFs have their own properties in tense and aspect.They usually use time adverbs such as "zao","dangchu",or "le" and "guo" that embody the perfect aspect to generate their counterfactual meanings.Finally,negation is also an indispensable syntactic feature in CCFs.Whether it negates the protasis or apodosis,or includes implicit negation in a sentence,it is necessary to perceive counterfactual meaning.In addition,this thesis analyzes the derivation process and negative scope of CCFs,and the semantic interpretation of modal hierarchy based on the Minimalist Program and Syntactic Cartography theory.It considers that negative hypotheses,negative words,and modal verbs play a significant role in generating counterfactual meaning.At last,this thesis summarizes the similarities and differences between Chinese and English counterfactual conditional sentences from syntactic and semantic perspectives.In terms of negation and hierarchical structure,they show the same account;but there are differences in morphological markers and fake tense and aspect.The study on English counterfactual conditional provides a reference for Chinese researches,but there is a large gap in the morphology between the two languages,and they need to be analyzed from different perspectives.Cross-linguistic research also gives this thesis its own thinking and relevant conclusions to further researches;thereare also the shortcomings of this research that we can make it more comprehensive in the future.