Semantic-Based Mental Representation of Chinese Counterfactuals: Evidence from a Psycholinguistic Study of Yaobushi *

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 (CCM)). 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 with 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.