What is it about?
It is about the kind of thinking that people engage in when they think what might/could have happened as opposed to what actually happened, and the language used in ordinary Chinese to convey what could have made a difference in a past reality, and what personal and interpersonal functions that kind of language serves.
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Why is it important?
It connects the functions of counterfactual reasoning - which often involves regret or relief - with the functions of the counterfactual language. It argues that counterfactual reasoning is ubiquitous and its linguistic representation is a semantic universal.
Perspectives
It challenges the hong-held misconception that the subjunctive is the only device of encoding counterfactual reasoning. Thereby it challenges the notion that because some languages lack the subjunctive their speakers cannot naturally think counterfactually.
Prof. Zhuo Jing-Schmidt
University of Oregon
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: What are they good for? A constructionist account of counterfactuals in ordinary Chinese, Journal of Pragmatics, May 2017, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2017.03.004.
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