What If Chinese Had Linguistic Markers for Counterfactual Conditionals? Language and Thought Revisited

Abstract

This study critically examines the widely held belief that the Chinese language provides no consistent linguistic forms for expressing counterfactual ideas (Bloom, 1981). In Study 1, native speakers of Chinese identified counterfactual sentences from a large corpus of Chinese texts. A number of syntactic and/or lexical forms are found to be highly predictive of counterfactuality. Aspect modification and other markers emerge as potentially universal linguistic mechanisms for counterfactual marking. Study 2 demonstrated that these linguistic markers significantly influence readers' interpretation of whether a sentence is factual or counterfactual, even after semantic and pragmatic information was controlled. Study 3 showed that the counterfactual markers influence on-line sentence comprehension in a self-paced reading paradigm. Taken together, the data reject Bloom’s conjuncture regarding Chinese counterfactuals and reveal cross-linguistic similarities and differences in linguistic representation of counterfactual thoughts.

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