The Study on the Temporality of General Conditionals in Modern Chinese

Abstract

This thesis is a study on temporality of the general conditionals from the perspective of “Three Domains”. At the beginning, we define the temporality, which consist of two elements--the occurring time of events in protasis and apodosis as well as the narrative time. In content domain, protasis is always before apodosis. However, in epistemic domain and speech-act domain, the protasis is salient, as a result of that, the occurring time of events becomes less important, which leads to more flexible word order.