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Chinese and counterfactual reasoning
DOI link for Chinese and counterfactual reasoning
Chinese and counterfactual reasoning book
Chinese and counterfactual reasoning
DOI link for Chinese and counterfactual reasoning
Chinese and counterfactual reasoning book
ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a scrutiny of the notion “subjunctive conditional” together with an introduction to the distinction of “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” factors affecting the nature of logical operators. This is followed by a cursory overview of psychological and grammatical research on counterfactual expressions in Mandarin Chinese. It then sets out a list of tasks to be accomplished and explicates a recent proposal that Mandarin counterfactuals can be formally divided into “explicit” and “implicit” counterfactuals, which cross-cut the tripartite division of “truthifiers”, “falsifiers” and “counterpossibles”. It is suggested that this understanding can serve as a unified framework to describe Chinese counterfactuals and can also be used to accommodate some related optative expressions found in several dialects.