'If triangles were circles...,': A study of counterfactuals in Chinese and in English.

摘要

This dissertation is a cross-cultural study of counterfactual (contrary-to-fact) expressions in Chinese and English in relation to counterfactual thinking. Specifically, the study investigates whether an alleged "lack" of linguistic devices for expressing the counterfactual in Chinese influences the counterfactual reasoning of native speakers of Chinese as compared to native speakers of English.;Chinese does not use morphological or structural markers equivalent to the English "were," "had been," or "would have been" to indicate counterfactual interpretations, i.e., what does not or did not actually happen. Rendered in Chinese, the sentence "If a triangle were a circle, ... " would read as "If a triangle is a circle, ... " Alfred H. Bloom (1981) hypothesized that the lack of such explicit counterfactual cues in Chinese prevents Chinese speakers from thinking counterfactually as readily as their English-speaking counterparts.;An experimental study (Study 1), a linguistic analysis, and a content analysis (Study 2) are presented in this dissertation. Study 1 tests the comprehension of 559 Chinese and 124 English native speakers on written material containing counterfactual elements. The linguistic analysis describes linguistic representations of Chinese and English counterfactuals. Study 2 analyzes counterfactual use in spontaneous speech data and newspapers in both languages.;The following is a brief summary of the results: (1) There is no difference between Chinese and English speakers in their ability to comprehend counterfactual texts. The counterfactual responses to the materials used in Study 1 are largely a function of subjects' general scholastic competence and the specific (culturally unfamiliar) content of the stimuli. (2) The linguistic analysis shows that both Chinese and English have explicit linguistic devices to express the counterfactual, but they exist at different levels in the two languages. In English, the linguistic markings are at the syntactic level, while in Chinese, they are distributed at the lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels. (3) Study 2 reveals different patterns of counterfactual use (frequency, topic, and function) in naturalistic settings. A higher frequency of counterfactual use is found in the English written texts (newspapers) than in the Chinese texts. Chinese and English speakers use counterfactuals with different topics for various purposes.