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Article published In:
Chinese Language and Discourse
Vol. 8:1 (2017) ► pp.95–126

Expressing conditionality in Mandarin

A corpus-based study of rúguǒ and zhǐyào

| Zhejiang University, China
| Utrecht University, The Netherlands

After a broad overview of Mandarin Chinese conditionality marking, this paper presents a corpus-based analysis of two conditional connectives, rúguǒ and zhǐyào (both translatable as ‘if’), from a syntactic and a cognitive perspective. We examine their use in narrative and informative texts along four parameters: clause order, position of the connective within the clause, domain, and counterfactuality. For all parameters, the two connectives displayed robust profiles across genres. Both connectives preferred an antecedent-consequent clause order. They displayed flexibility in their position, behaving like adverbs, with rúguǒ showing a stronger preference for the pre-subject position than zhǐyào. In terms of domains, zhǐyào has a stronger preference for content conditionals than rúguǒ, which is also frequently used in the epistemic domain. In our data, only rúguǒ was used meta-metaphorically and in counterfactuals. We argue that both connectives can be translated with ‘if’, but zhǐyào also matches ‘so/as long as’.

Keywords: conditionals, conjunctions, counterfactuals, mental spaces, domain
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Expressing conditionality in Chinese
    • 2.1Conditionals in spoken Chinese
    • 2.2Unconditionals, and necessary and sufficient conditionals in Chinese
    • 2.3Other linguistic markers expressing conditionality
    • 2.4Counterfactuals in Chinese
  • 3. Rúguǒ versus zhǐyào
    • 3.1Morphology and syntax of rúguǒ and zhǐyào
    • 3.2Semantics of rúguǒ and zhǐyào
  • 4.A cognitive approach to conditionals
    • 4.1Content domain
    • 4.2Epistemic domain
    • 4.3Speech-act domain
    • 4.4Metalinguistic domain
    • 4.5Meta-metaphorical domain
    • 4.6Metaspatial domain
  • 5.A corpus-based analysis of rúguǒ and zhǐyào
    • 5.1Corpus description
    • 5.2Sample
    • 5.3Analytical methods
      • 5.3.1Clause order and position of the connective
      • 5.3.2Domain
      • 5.3.3Counterfactuality
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Clause order
    • 6.2Position of the connectives
    • 6.3Domain distribution
    • 6.4Counterfactuality
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.8.1.06che
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