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- Title
Expressing conditionality in Mandarin: A corpus-based study of rúguo and zhiyào.
- Authors
Weiying Chen; Evers-Vermeul, Jacqueline
- Abstract
After a broad overview of Mandarin Chinese conditionality marking, this paper presents a corpus-based analysis of two conditional connectives, rúguo and zhiyào (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 rúguo showing a stronger preference for the pre-subject position than zhiyào. In terms of domains, zhiyào has a stronger preference for content conditionals than rúguo, which is also frequently used in the epistemic domain. In our data, only rúguo was used meta-metaphorically and in counterfactuals. We argue that both connectives can be translated with 'if ', but zhiyào also matches 'so/as long as'.
- Subjects
MANDARIN dialects; CONNECTIVES (Linguistics); SEMANTICS; CLAUSES (Grammar); CONDITIONALS (Grammar); CONJUNCTIONS (Grammar); COUNTERFACTUALS (Logic)
- Publication
Chinese Language & Discourse, 2017, Vol 8, Issue 1, p95
- ISSN
1877-7031
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1075/cld.8.1.06che