What are they good for? A constructionist account of counterfactuals in ordinary Chinese

Abstract

The ubiquity of counterfactual thinking as an experiential universal is well established in social psychology, decision research and neuropsychology. It challenges both the premise and the conclusion of earlier studies on the linguistic relativity of Chinese counterfactuality, which focused on the cognitive effect of the assumed absence of counterfactual marking in Chinese (Bloom, 1981; Au, 1983, 1984; Liu, 1985; Yeh and Gentner, 2005). Recent corpus-based as well as formal semantic research indicates the role of patterned combinations of lexical and grammatical structures in counterfactual interpretations in Chinese (Feng and Yi, 2006; Wang and Jiang, 2011; Wang, 2013), a finding consistent with recent formal pragmatic research that rejects the notion of a single grammatical category as a dedicated marker of counterfactuality across languages (Jiang, 2000; Van Linden and Verstraete, 2008; Patard, 2014; Elder and Jaszczolt, 2016). Despite the demystification of the lack of counterfactual marking in Chinese, little is known about the form-function mapping of Chinese counterfactuals. This study takes a constructionist approach to counterfactual language in Chinese and analyzes the pairing of counterfactual constructions with particular discourse functions in ordinary communication. The analysis elucidates the affective force and interpersonal functions of counterfactual language, and affirms the human relevance and significance of counterfactual reasoning.