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Volume 8, Issue 1
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Abstract

After a broad overview of Mandarin Chinese conditionality marking, this paper presents a corpus-based analysis of two conditional connectives, and (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 showing a stronger preference for the pre-subject position than . In terms of domains, has a stronger preference for content conditionals than , which is also frequently used in the epistemic domain. In our data, only was used meta-metaphorically and in counterfactuals. We argue that both connectives can be translated with ‘if’, but also matches ‘so/as long as’.

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/content/journals/10.1075/cld.8.1.06che
2017-09-19
2024-10-03

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/content/journals/10.1075/cld.8.1.06che
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Expressing conditionality in Mandarin
Chinese Language and Discourse 8, 95 (2017); https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.8.1.06che
/content/journals/10.1075/cld.8.1.06che
/content/journals/10.1075/cld.8.1.06che
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): conditionals; conjunctions; counterfactuals; domain; mental spaces; 反事实条件句; 域; 心理空间; 条件句; 连词

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