Hsu, C.F. (2014). Semantic-Based Mental Representation of Chinese Counterfactuals: Evidence from a Psycholinguistic Study of Yaobushi. Language and Linguistics, 15(3), 391-410.
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Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate whether yaobushi is a counterfactual conjunction in Chinese by comparing mental operations of counterfactual representations (constituent comparison model, hereafter CCM; Carpenter & Just, 1975). Because of the mismatch between the syntactic structures and semantic intentions of counterfactuals, two possible mental representations of counterfactuals were generated: form-based and meaning-based. Based on the CCM, the processing order of the test sentences indexed by truth value and polarity was different. Different presentation times were applied to induce a genuine mental representation of Chinese counterfactuals. Participants were presented counterfactual clauses and test sentences, which were matched or mismatched to the meanings of the target clauses. The results reveal that, regardless of the presentation time, meaning-based mental representations were constructed. Additional analyses clarified that yaobushi is an authentic counterfactual conjunctive rather than the combination of a conditional conjunction yaoshi and a negation bushi. Our empirical findings were confirmed by a search through the corpus database of Academia Sinica; therefore, in Chinese, yaobushi differentiates the imaginative world from reality without the absolute necessity of the context.
Keywords
Counterfactual Mental representation Proposition comparison Chinese Negation
(Full paper is available upon request.)
以語意為心理表徵基礎之中文與過去事實相反假設語氣：
來自「要不是」心理語言學研究證據
摘要
本篇研究目的探討「要不是」是否為中文與過去事實相反假設語氣連接詞，研究方法運用詞組比較模型(constituent comparison model)，透過比較以「要不是」起首條件句形成之心理表徵所含命題，藉由其句法與語意不一致特性，提出兩種可能心理表徵並加以驗證，一為句法層次心理表徵，二為語意層次心理表徵，操弄刺激呈現時間差驗證表徵假設。受試者坐在電腦前閱讀以「要不是」起首條件句及語意測試句，分為同時呈現(實驗一)及分開呈現(實驗二)，判斷兩句是否語意相同。實驗結果顯示，以中文為母語受試者處理「要不是」條件句形成語意心理表徵，而非句法心理表徵，證明「要不是」為中文與過去事實相反假設語氣連接詞。此研究結果與中央研究院現代漢語平衡語料庫詞庫資料一致，「要不是」並非只是結合假設連接詞「要是」與否定詞「不是」，而是與過去事實相反假設語氣連接詞，「要不是」區分中文母語使用者想像世界與真實，研究結果進一步支持文章脈絡在中文與過去事實相反假設語氣並非必要條件。
關鍵詞：假設語氣連接詞 心理表徵 命題比較 中文否定詞
(Full paper is available upon request.)
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