Markedness Theory (or the Theory of Markedness) is the study of how languages differ from each other and to map some linguistic phenomena into a specific language.
It investigates universal grammar and also one particular linguistic phenomenon. The term “markedness” is that “a phenomenon A in some languages is more marked than B if the presence of A in a language implies the presence of B; but the presence of B does not imply the presence of A” (Eckman 1977:320). Based on the logical definition, the occurrence of a marked form can predict the occurrence of an unmarked form.
Markedness Theory is highly discussed in syntax and phonology, however, it is understood as a map and device of language acquisition research (Williams1981). In language acquisition, an unmarked case, which is conceived as children’s initial comprehension or hypothesis of a language, emerges earlier than a marked one (Williams 1981). A marked case, however, acquires later in children’s speech. In
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addition, Eckman argues that the degree of difficulty in language is in accord with the degree of markedness. In other words, a marked case is more difficult for children to acquire and some errors are likely to be made when children produce marked forms.
With regard to the presumption, Rutherford (1982) claims that markedness is equal to psycholinguistic complexity and sentential complexity. Taking an English conditional for instance (If you had seen my younger sister, you would have known that she was pregnant.), the lexical forms of a counterfactual conditional is marked since it consists
of relatively complicated inflectional markings and it takes much more effort for children to anchor a time frame like the event time and the speech time.
Other scholars also explore markedness of conditionals. Athanasiadou and Dirven (1997) examined the prototypicality of English conditionals. They suggested imaginative conditionals (ICs), including hypothetical and counterfactual conditionals, should be prototypical. Among imaginative conditionals (ICs), the different degree of markedness relies on the commitment to the realization of the situation. In other words, the decisive factor is whether readers or hearers disengage themselves from a real situation but consider potential realities. If the statement of an IC is potentially real, it is unmarked. On the contrary, it is a marked case if the situation is unreal (i.e., contrary to the present or past).
Even though the concept of markedness is widely discussed, the criteria to discover an unmarked case deserves further investigation. According to Cairns (1983), two criteria, overt marking and frequency counts, are problematic in the Markedness Theory. However, his argument stems from the phonological and morphological studies of Markedness Theory. The researcher would like to investigate whether the observation needs to be reconsidered in the present study.
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2.2 Pervious Theoretical Studies of Mandarin Chinese Conditionals
This section is concerned with the theoretical studies of Mandarin Chinese conditionals. In the literature, Li and Thompson (1981) discuss Mandarin Chinese conditionals in discourse, and following Li and Thompson (1981), Wu (1994), further examin Chinese conditionals from the syntactic and semantic perspectives. However, Cheng and Huang (1996) probe into some particular conditional structures of Mandarin Chinese: bare conditionals, ruguo conditionals and dou conditionals in syntax. Then, Chierchia (2000) argues against Cheng and Huang’s (1996) observation by proposing a semantic constraint. Finally, Su (2005) discusses the relationships of Chinese conditionals in terms of discourse. These studies will be reviewed in the following subsections.
2.2.1 Li and Thompson (1981)
According to Li and Thompson (1981), Mandarin Chinese conditionals are one type of forward linking sentences, which consist of two parts, an antecedent (if…) and a consequent (then clause) clause. The antecedent clause introduces the condition of a sentence first, and the consequent clause, which represents a true proposition, makes the meaning of the sentence complete.
Li and Thompson argue that Chinese conditionals can be made in certain ways.
First, they can be made with linking words (i.e., clause-initial conditional adverbials) in the antecedent clause, such as dehua 'if,' as can be seen in (1):
( 1) Ta you qian dehua jiu bu hui xiang wo jie qian.
he have money if then NEG will to me borrow money
‘If he has money, he won’t borrow money from me.’
Second, some linking words can be used in Chinese conditionals like ruguo, jiaru,
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jiashi and yaoshi ‘if,’ as in (2):
( 2 ) Yahoshi jintian fan jia jiu hao le.
if today set free holiday then good PT ‘If we are on holiday today, that would be good.’
Third, no overt linking element, with jiu ‘then’ in the consequent clause, may be used in conditionals, as shown in (3):
( 3) Wo shuo keyi jiu keyi.
I say OK then OK
‘If I say it’s OK, then it’s OK.’
Nevertheless, this type of usage shows that the proposition of the antecedent clause does not depend on the consequent clause, indicating that the antecedent clause can independently appear in other contexts. Thus, speakers may interpret a conditional sentence as a temporal sentence like ‘Once I say it’s OK, then it’s OK.’
Interrogatives, lastly, can be employed in no-linking conditionals such as shei
‘who’ and sheme ‘what,’ as shown below:
(4) Shei zui le jiu fa shi kuai qian.
who drunk PT then fine ten dollar money ‘Whoever is drunk, h/she is fined by ten dollars.’
Furthermore, Li and Thompson examine meanings of conditionals from discourse and semantic perspectives. Three basic scenarios of Mandarin Chinese conditionals are classified: (1) Reality, (2) Hypothetical, and (3) Counterfactual conditionals1. Reality conditionals indicate the relation between two propositions in the real world, as in (5):
1 Hypothetical and counterfactual conditionals belong to Imaginative Conditionals (Li and Thompson 1981).
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The consequent clause, as in (5), is an expectation that may be realized in the real world about the antecedent clause. Furthermore, it can represent a suggestion, a comment and an assertion.
The second type, hypothetical conditionals, shows a possibly true situation in an imaginative world where speakers imagine a context (the antecedent clause) and make a comment, an assertion or even as a question based on the proposition (the result clause). Sentence (6) is a hypothetical conditional, as shown below:
(6) Jiaru ni gei qiche zhuang dao (Li and Thompson 1981:451)
Finally, counterfactual conditionals, as the name displayed, represent a counterfactual situation in which the event of the sentence may be hypothetically true i.e., contrary to present or past. For example, the listener in (7) did not take the speaker’s advice, so h/she suffered.
Though three kinds of scenarios of Mandarin Chinese conditionals are introduced, it
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is not necessary to differentiate the time frame when we hear a conditional. Li and Thompson suggest that context and speakers’ judgments can influence the interpretation of sentences. When the speaker utters a conditional, hearers may make a reality interpretation because h/she wants or plans to make the propositions possibly true. Probably, hearers may regard (7) as a hypothetical conditional because both the speaker and the hearer can imagine a situation that the hearer does not listen to the speaker’s words. In this case, a conditional sentence can be considered as a reality, hypothetical or counterfactual conditional. Therefore, context, especially the context that the speaker and the hearer co-construct and identify, is crucial when we assess Chinese conditionals.
Overall, Li and Thompson (1981) discuss elements of Mandarin Chinese conditionals. Furthermore, they describe that forms themselves may not represent different interpretations of conditionals. Nevertheless, discourse and semantic factors are scrutinized in Chinese conditionals. Context, which is significant, provides different intents of message of the speaker and the hearer in speech.
To sum up, Li and Thompson’s (1981) statement of Mandarin Chinese conditionals is descriptive and explicit. Nevertheless, they only describe the literal markings but do not mention the syntactic or semantic differences of the four types of conditionals they classify. To them, Chinese conditionals, hence, are considered of equal importance without hierarchical structures being compared.
2.2.2 Wu (1994)
Different from Li and Thompson emphasizing the importance of context, Wu (1994) examines Chinese conditionals from the semantic and syntactic perspectives.
She argues that there are five explicit grammatical markers in Chinese conditionals.
Among these markers, clause-initial conditional adverbials are the most typical in
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expressing conditionals such as ruguo, yaoshi, ruoshi, and jiashi ‘if’. In addition to listing these clause-initial conditional adverbials, Wu further classifies these words into three categories according to the likelihood of supposition, as shown in Table 2-1:
Table 2-1 Types of Chinese If-words in Wu (1994) Category Chinese Gloss in English
The clause-initial conditional adverbials of the first category are neutral in the degree of possibility. In other words, they show no other intended meanings. Those of the second category reveal the least likelihood of fulfillment and the negative meanings.
The if-words of the third category contain “various meanings of ‘if’ and different degrees of likelihood (Wu 1994:148).” However, ruguo and jiaru, which are often used as typical and unmarked conditional adverbials in Chinese, belong to different categories in Wu’s argument. Such a categorization may encourage more sophisticated observation and the researcher supposes that these two words may belong to the same category.
Wu also examines a clause-final conditional adverbial dehua ‘the supposition that, the case that,’ as previously discussed in Lü’s (1942) and Chao (1968). Although dehua can be omitted in Chinese conditionals, Wu argues that dehua is an
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independent conjunction, indicating an equal degree of importance compared to other Chinese if-words.
In addition, Wu claims that jiu ‘then, would’ in the consequent clause of Chinese conditionals helps to indicate a hypothetical meaning. Jiu is not equivalent to English then or would since it cannot be deleted in Chinese conditionals but then or would can
be dropped in English. Furthermore, jiu itself shows a thorough conditional meaning without the presence of any if-words; hence, it is not simply a particle. It occupies a significant position in Chinese conditionals.
Following Lü (1942) and Chan (1968), Wu also examines negators in Mandarin Chinese conditionals. It is argued that negators display conditional or even counterfactual meanings without any if-words as in (8):
(8) Ni bu lai wo bu qu. (Chao 1968:116) you NEG come I NEG go
‘If you don’t come, I don’t go.’
In addition to presenting detectable conditional adverbials of Mandarin Chinese conditionals, Wu reviews Lü and Li and Thompson’s findings that no conjunctions are included in Chinese conditionals. However, covert markings may suggest some linguistic clues in conditional messages. In covert marking of conditionals, there is a noticeable pause, a subordinate marking, between the antecedent and the consequent clause. Since pausing is a suprasegmental marking in sentences, Wu suggests that it should be treated as a Chinese grammatical element in conditionals. Interestingly, this kind of sentence can be considered as a temporal expression since the meaning of the sentence mainly depends on context.
Based on the previous discussion, Wu classifies Mandarin Chinese conditionals into the following five types (Wu 1994:155).
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Table 2-2 Five Types of Chinese Conditionals in Wu’s Study
To sum up, Wu reviews some previous studies and states that jiu ‘then’ serves as a syntactic status of Chinese conditionals. Moreover, she argues that negators and suprasegmental markings are used in Mandarin Chinese conditionals. Thus, she proposes more types of conditionals than the previous researchers.
2.2.3 Cheng and Huang (1996)
Cheng and Huang (1996) discuss Mandarin Chinese conditionals with indefinite wh-words that have the semantic meanings of donkey sentences. They argue that Chinese conditionals with donkey anaphora can be classified into two paradigms. One type is called bare conditionals and the other is further divided into two subtypes, ruguo- and dou- conditionals.
Bare conditionals are conditionals without a clause-initial conditional adverbial such as ruguo ‘if’ in an antecedent clause or a quantifier like dou ‘all’ in a consequent clause, as shown in (9):
Conditional clauses Consequent clauses
1. The typical conditional
ruguo/ yaoshi ‘if’ jiu ‘then’
2.Clause-final particle, with optional ‘if’
Ruguo/yaoshi 'if' ... dehua jiu ‘then’
3. Adverbial conjunction in the consequent clause,
without ‘if’ ……. jiu ‘then’
4. No linking element, with a pause between the two clauses
……., (pause)……..
5. Negative in one or both clauses
Bu-shi/ mei-you ‘not; no’ Bu-shi/ mei-you ‘not; no’
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(9) Shei xian lai shei xian chi. (Cheng and Huang 1996:127) who first come who first eat
‘If X comes first, X eats first.’
In their opinion, the wh-words in the antecedent and the consequent clauses must be identical, as in (9). Conditionals will be ill-formed if the wh-word in the consequent clause is substituted by an overt pronoun like ta ‘he,’ covert pronoun [e] or a definite NP like nageren ‘that person’.
Based on the Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), Cheng and Huang suggest that wh-words are indefinite NPs without inherent quantification force.
Therefore, an external licenser, called a necessity operator with the force of universal quantification, licenses and binds two distinct wh-words simultaneously. This kind of quantification, therefore, is called ‘unselectively’ binding. In addition, wh-words, treated not as quantifiers but variables, are independent in nature and neither of them is syntactically anaphoric to another.
As mentioned before, wh-words in Chinese bare conditionals must appear in pairs. Cheng and Huang, then, adopt Kratzer’s Prohibition Against Vacuous Quantification to explain the tempting occurrence of wh-words.
(10) Prohibition Against Vacuous Quantification (Kratzer 1989:155) For every quantifier Q, there must be a variable x such that Q binds an
occurrence of x in both its restrictive clause2 and its nuclear scope3.
The argument indicates the necessity of two identical wh-words in bare conditionals. If we just use one wh-word in either the antecedent or consequent clauses, (10) will be violated.
To avoid overt pronouns in the consequent clause, they state that the overt
2 A restrictive clause is an antecedent clause in conditionals.
3 A nuclear scope is a consequent clause in conditionals.
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pronouns can be considered as: (1) bound variables or (2) E-type pronouns4 (Evans 1980). If the overt pronoun in the consequent clause is a bound variable, the accessibility condition will be violated since the wh-word in the antecedent clause does not c-command it and none of its element is accessible. As for the status of E-type pronouns, it will also lead to vacuous quantification since E-type pronouns are not variables.
Considering the constraint on empty pronouns and definite NPs in the consequent clause, Cheng and Huang apply the Parallelism Constraint on Operator Binding (PCOB), as in (11) to account for their unavailability.
(11) The Parallelism Constraint on Operator Binding (PCOB) (Safir 1984:607) If O is an operator and x is a variable bound by O, then for any y, y a variable of O, x and y are [α lexical].
The [α lexical] stands for the identical occurrence of variables. In this case, the variables in bare conditionals must be either all lexical [+lexical]5 or all empty [-lexical].
The second type conditionals with donkey anaphora, ruguo- and dou-conditionals, nevertheless, display the complementary scenario compared with bare conditionals.
Briefly speaking, if there is a wh-word in the antecedent clause, the identical wh-word cannot be used. Nonetheless, a pronoun, an empty category, or a definite NP are welcomed in the consequent clause. Under these circumstances, the grammatical properties are discussed for the complementary distribution between the two main conditional types, as shown in (12) and (13):
4 E-type pronouns, as Evans states (1980:340) refer to “the objects that verify the antecedent quantifier-containing clause,” and “the truth of the clause containing them requires that all the relevant objects satisfy the predicate…” In addition, E-type pronouns cannot take negative quantifiers like no one or nobody as their antecedents.
5 ‘[+lexical]’ refers to the same word usage in either the antecedent or consequent clauses.
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To begin with, Cheng and Huang expound on the ungrammaticality of the wh-word in a consequent clause of ruguo and dou conditionals. In ruguo conditionals, ruguo ‘if’
licenses the wh-word in an antecedent clause. The wh-word, hence, is considered as an existential quantifier in the scope of the antecedent clause. It represents that a complete tripartite conditional structure is manifested in the antecedent clause through Quantifier Raising. On account of the property, there is no need for wh-word to occur in the consequent clause. If it does appear in the consequent clause, the binding and the licensing problems will result in the ungrammaticality of these conditionals.
Dou-conditionals, however, seem to be interpreted in different ways. The
antecedent clause of a dou conditional is claimed to be an embedded question, inherently having the force of existential quantification. Given the existential nature of the clause, the wh-word in it is treated as an existential quantifier just like that in a ruguo conditional. Similar to ruguo conditionals, the grammatical movement in the
antecedent clause of dou conditionals definitely denies the availability of another wh-word in the consequent clause.
Second, Cheng and Huang illustrate why anaphoric elements can appear in the consequent clause of ruguo and dou conditionals. They propose that the anaphoric forms can be regarded as E-type pronouns. In aforementioned discussion, one feature of E-type pronouns is that they cannot occur in a negative-quantification sentence.
With the nature, the ungrammatical example shown in the following clearly verifies
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that the anaphoric form in the conditional is an E-type pronoun.
(14 ) *Ruguo meiyo shei ma ni (Cheng and Huang 1996:144) if not-have who scold you
ni jiu jiao ta lai jian wo.
you then ask him/her come see me
‘*If no one scolds you, then you ask him/her to come see me.’
To sum up, Cheng and Huang only discuss the donkey conditionals, which have not been mentioned in the previous studies. Because of the relatively peculiar forms of these conditional types, they employ two constraints on the interpretation of these conditionals. The bare conditionals are accounted for by unselective binding while ruguo and dou conditionals are analyzed as a construction with E-type pronouns.
Wh-words, in this case, show different status in these two types of conditionals. Cheng and Huang’s approach skillfully solved the unspecified status of wh-words. However, whether or not the occurrence of wh-words in conditionals may cause the acquisition difficulty for children is not addressed in their study.
2.2.4 Chierchia (2000)
Chierchia, following Cheng and Huang (1996), analyze two types of donkey Chinese conditionals as well. He points out problems with Cheng and Huang’s arguments and probes into the property of wh-words based on Dynamic Semantics.
According to Cheng and Huang, wh-words, with identical forms in two clauses of bare conditionals, have to occur in pairs. The wh-words, according to Chierchia, are not independent at all. He assumes that a novelty condition has to be found when there is a wh-word in the antecedent clause. However, the wh-word in a consequent clause suggests a familiarity condition since it is semantically bound by the previous wh-word. The specificity of wh-words in bare conditionals makes the status
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unpredictive and context dependent.
Following the view of Dynamic Semantics, Chierchia first examines the nature of Chinese wh-words. Examining the occurrence of wh-words in different types of Chinese conditionals, he claims that wh-words should be indefinite pronouns since they are in accordance with the following properties, as in (15):
(15) Properties of indefinite pronouns (Chierchia 2000:33) a. Existential interpretation in episodic contexts.
b. Can be targeted for disclosure by Q-adverbs (quantification adverbs).
c. No c-command binding
d. No (or only loose) anaphoric links among indefinite pronouns.
Then, he argues that the licensing of wh-words in bare conditionals is the disclosure operator (the index i), which associates with the quantificational adverb (ADVi), as shown in (16):
(16) IP (Chierchia 2000:36)
CP ADVi IP
sheii xian jinlai wo xian da sheii
who first enters I first hit who ‘If X enters first, I hit X first.’
In Dynamic Semantics, an adverb of quantification can be either [+ affective] or [-
In Dynamic Semantics, an adverb of quantification can be either [+ affective] or [-