Ren Yufei, Cui Gang, Christie Stella
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
Tsinghua Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
Sci Rep. 2023 Dec 27;13(1):23064. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-49775-x.
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.
人们如何表征反事实呢？由于不同语言在反事实的可表达性上存在差异——一些语言使用明确的语法标记来表示反事实，而另一些语言则没有——那么是否有些说话者对反事实的表征不那么明确呢？之前针对说中文的人（中文没有明确的反事实标记）研究这个问题时，结果不一。在这里，我们通过使用一个更灵敏的测试重新审视了这个问题：人们检测句子中异常情况的敏感度。我们让说中文的人对使用“如果……那么……”结构的句子的可接受性进行评分——这是反事实的典型但不唯一、不明确的标记。关键的是，我们改变了与现实世界事实的语义一致性（事实性），一些句子包含虚构的条件（如“如果鱼有腿，那么……”中的非事实情况）与真实事实（如“如果狗有腿，那么……”中的事实情况）。如果说话者能清晰地表征反事实，那么他们对非事实情况句子的可接受性评分应该高于事实情况句子，因为反事实的表面目的是表达非事实情况。也就是说，在句法反事实结构下表达一个真实事实会使句子显得异常。相反，我们发现说中文的人给出了相反的评分：事实性的“如果……那么……”句子比非事实性的句子被评为更可接受。这表明说中文的人发现处理反事实比处理事实更具挑战性，并且他们对反事实的表征可能不那么明确。总体而言，这项研究有助于我们理解语言标记与认知表征之间的联系。
