The Pragmatic Functions of Conditionals in Mandarin Chinese

[[abstract]]This study aims to investigate what the pragmatic functions conditionals serve in daily Mandarin interlocutions. There are eighteen conditional markers examined in the database collected for this study. Furthermore, it is as well found that even Mandarin is a language without overt tense marking system; this language applies various conditional markers with different hypotheticality degrees, to accommodate propositions with various negativity degrees. Sweetser (1990) categories conditionals into content conditionals, epistemic conditionals, and speech act conditionals. The present study, based on her illuminating findings, further distinguishes the pragmatic functions of Mandarin conditionals into typical, topic-marking, epistemic, evaluative, afterthoughts, and conditionals for politeness. Typical conditionals are those whose relations between the protases and apodoses are deduced from pure logical reasoning. Such conditionals are uttered either for describing the uncertainty with a hedged tone, or to wrap up the overt negativity within. Conditionals for pure topic-marking are those for mitigating the contrast of topic shifting in interlocutions; however, the apodoses within conditionals usually carry speaker’s certain intentions or attitudes so that we further subcategory them into epistemic and evaluative. Epistemic conditionals are those based on speaker’s knowledge or judgments; however, such function is never as dominant as Su (2005) claimed, since we hardly deduce the most likely interference among all the possibilities without carrying our personal attitudes. Thus, what stands out in why conditionals are uttered would be to provide personal evaluations, since conditionality forms an evaluative frame itself (Akatsuka and Clancy 1993; Akatsuka and Strauss 2000; Bloom and Keil 2001; Dancygier 1993, 1998; Eiser and Mower White 1974, 1975; Eiser and Osmon 1978; Huang 1982; NOH 1996; Sweetser 1990; Van Schie, Martijn and Van der Pligt 1994; Xu, Li-jie 2008). Such a function especially dominates word-of-saying conditional markers, which might be a unique linguistic feature in Mandarin. Since conditionals offers options, it is a politeness strategy in performing speech acts, and the politeness increases along with the hypotheticality degrees since room for options expands. Due to the fundamental linguistic feature, i.e., discourse-linking, in conditionality as well as its serving a politeness strategy in easing the imposing extra cognition load and the disturbance of information flow, conditionals may well be uttered for adding extra comments to what has been uttered previously. There are abundant literature examining conditionals in Mandarin before as well; however, this study starts from a different perspective, i.e., from it pragmatic functions instead of certain conditional marker only.