Expressing conditionality in Mandarin
A corpus-based study of rúguǒ and zhǐyào
After a broad overview of Mandarin Chinese conditionality marking, this paper presents a corpus-based analysis of two conditional connectives, rúguǒ and zhǐyào (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 rúguǒ showing a stronger preference for the pre-subject position than zhǐyào. In terms of domains, zhǐyào has a stronger preference for content conditionals than rúguǒ, which is also frequently used in the epistemic domain. In our data, only rúguǒ was used meta-metaphorically and in counterfactuals. We argue that both connectives can be translated with ‘if’, but zhǐyào also matches ‘so/as long as’.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Expressing conditionality in Chinese
- 2.1Conditionals in spoken Chinese
- 2.2Unconditionals, and necessary and sufficient conditionals in Chinese
- 2.3Other linguistic markers expressing conditionality
- 2.4Counterfactuals in Chinese
- 3.
Rúguǒ versus zhǐyào
- 3.1Morphology and syntax of rúguǒ and zhǐyào
- 3.2Semantics of rúguǒ and zhǐyào
- 4.A cognitive approach to conditionals
- 4.1Content domain
- 4.2Epistemic domain
- 4.3Speech-act domain
- 4.4Metalinguistic domain
- 4.5Meta-metaphorical domain
- 4.6Metaspatial domain
- 5.A corpus-based analysis of rúguǒ and zhǐyào
- 5.1Corpus description
- 5.2Sample
- 5.3Analytical methods
- 5.3.1Clause order and position of the connective
- 5.3.2Domain
- 5.3.3Counterfactuality
- 6.Results
- 6.1Clause order
- 6.2Position of the connectives
- 6.3Domain distribution
- 6.4Counterfactuality
- 7.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References