From Non-Factives To Counter-Factives In Chinese

Counterfactual constructions are grammatical constructions that convey situations contrary to the facts.Cross-linguistic studies have shown that different languages employ different strategies to express counterfactuality.For the Indo-European languages,tense morphemes,aspect morphemes,and mood morphemes are usually used to mark counterfactuality.However,as a non-inflectional language,Mandarin Chinese has no morphological markings on verb forms,and the temporal information is often revealed through certain hypothetical conjunctions,time deixis,aspectual markers,and context information.So,the ways expressing counterfactuals in Chinese are much less systematic than those in Indo-European languages.Due to this,most of previous studies on Chinese counterfactuals are descriptive.In this paper,we will focus on the counterfactual construction�benlai yinggai ?(de)',whose corresponding form in English is �should have done'--a typical and frequently used counterfactual structure.Although the latter has been attracted a lot of concerns abroad,few researchers investigate the former in a great depth.This thesis mainly aims at solving the following two questions concerning the �benlai yinggai ?(de)'construction:1)Does the deontic modal construction �yinggai ? de' always have a counterfactual interpretation when �?' is a past event? If it is not,then why?2)How to derive the counterfactual readings in sentences of the form �benlai yinggai ?(de)'?Our findings are as follows: First,we find that the deontic modal construction �yinggai ?de' doesn't always give rise to a counterfactual reading when �?' is a past event.Under certain circumstances,the sentence-final particle �de' is actually a mood particle as a part of the �shi......de' construction with �shi' being omitted,which reinforces the speaker's affirmation and certainty towards his statement.Second,we propose that the adverb �benlai'has two semantic meanings: 1)denoting a past time as a temporal adverb,which is similar to�originally' and �formerly';2)emphasizing an objective fact or what the speaker believes to be true,which usually co-occurs with �jiu' as a modal adverb.And �benlai' in �benlai yinggai?(de)' is a temporal adverb.Only in this way can �benlai yinggai ?(de)' always obtain a counterfactual reading,which accords with the collected language data and our intuition.In other words,the possible factual reading of �yinggai ? de' is eliminated by the temporal adverb �benlai'.And the temporal perspective of yinggai' is back-shifted by �benlai'.Since�benlai' also requires a contrastive information,the truth of �?' in possible worlds at the past time implies the falsity of �?' at the real world.Hence,the counterfactual reading yields.It is hoped that this thesis will enrich the research on the structure of �benlai yinggai ?(de)' and help us better understand Chinese counterfactuals.