Facts in counterfactuals-cognitive representations of Chinese counterfactuals

How do people represent counterfactuals? As languages differ in expressibility of counterfactuals—some languages employ explicit grammatical marking for counterfactuals while others do not—are some speakers’ representations of counterfactuals less explicit? Prior studies examining this question with Chinese speakers—a language devoid of explicit counterfactual markings—found mixed results. Here we re-examined the issue by using a more sensitive test: people’s sensitivity to detect anomalies in sentences. We asked Chinese speakers to rate the acceptability of sentences employing “ruguo (if)…jiu (then)” configuration—the typical but non-unique, non-explicit marking of counterfactuals. Critically, we varied the semantic adherence to real-world facts [factuality], with some sentences containing made-up conditions [-fact as in “If fish had legs, then…”] versus real facts [+ fact: “If dogs had legs, then…”]. If speakers represent counterfactuals clearly, they should give higher acceptability ratings to [− facts] than to [+ facts] sentences, because the ostensible point of counterfactuals is to express non-factual situations. That is, expressing a true fact under a syntactic counterfactual construction makes the sentence anomalous. Instead, we found that Chinese speakers gave the opposite ratings: factual “if…then” sentences were rated as more acceptable than non-factual ones. This suggests that Chinese speakers find the processing of counterfactuals to be more challenging than processing facts, and that their representation of counterfactuals may be less explicit. Overall, this research contributes to our understanding of the link between linguistic markings and cognitive representations.