In the human communicative system, displacement is a unique design feature of language which enables verbal communication to go beyond temporal and spatial restrictions and extend its topic to the matter of any time and any place. Counterfactuals are one of such kind of linguistic vehicles, widely existing in different world languages and exhibiting the advanced cognitive abilities of human beings superior to the rest of animal world. Research across languages has found that time and modality are deep structural information attached to verbs，reflecting the basic logic of language. This study aims to examine the function of logical factors, namely time and modality, in the formation of counterfactuality (CF) in Chinese conditionals. By manipulating the TAM information, it attempts to further probe the mechanism underlying the CF comprehension.
This research includes two parts. In the first part, the researcher conducted three experiments to explore if and how temporal information affects the CF comprehension. The first experiment manipulated the presence or absence of tense to test whether the absolute time reference weighs in course of understanding CF. The second experiment manipulated the presence or absence of aspect to test whether the relative time reference weighs in course of understanding CF. The result shows that tense is a potent device when expressing CF while aspect is a weak one in the same process. In order to balance the emotional value in possible counterfactuals, a polarity difference (affirmation vs negation) in antecedents was added as a factor in the first two experiments. The results indicate that affirmative antecedents claim more counts of counterfactuals when judging Chinese conditionals without temporal information. In the third experiment, the researcher applied eye-tracking technology to detect the processing of three types of conditionals with different temporal information (dangshi (past-tense)/ yijing (aspectual)/no-time-info). The results show that the conditionals with tense element can be earlier and better understood than the other two types，while the conditionals with aspectual information encounters more difficulties in later stage of processing, indicating that tense and aspect modulate the semantic processing of Chinese conditionals in different manners.
There is a systemic variation between time in the antecedent and modality in the consequent of a conditional. It is then assumed that the subjective possibility expressed by modals in consequents of the conditionals may also influence the CF comprehension. In the second study, two experiments were conducted to examine how the modals of different probabilistic levels affect the processing of counterfactuality in conditionals. Experiment 4 explored the role of basic epistemic modals on the understanding of CF of Chinese conditionals. The result indicates that there is significant difference caused by the modal adverbs with distinct subjective probabilities when judging CF. The Necessity modal elicits more CF contexts than Possibility modal. Meanwhile the researcher also found that the negation in the consequents effectively contributes to the formation of CF of conditionals and twists the relation between subjective probability and the CF recognition. Experiment 5 further investigated the interaction between contexts and modal adverbs of different probabilities. It is found that there is a significant difference in choice frequencies of modals, between CF conditionals and indicative conditionals, especially those of the modal adverb with high probability in CF conditionals and those of the modal adverbs with moderate probability in indicative ones. Further analysis on the reaction time of the two task stages(reading the conditional/making a choice) indicates that CF contexts accelerate the judging tasks of all three modal adverbs. In both two stages, modal adverbs of high probability were better processed no matter it is a CF or indicative conditionals. During the forced-choice stage, subjects spent more time on the moderate probability adverbs in CF conditionals and the low probability adverbs in indicative conditionals. Therefore, there is complex relation between the probability of modal words and the processing of conditional CF.
The two parts of the current research demonstrate the important roles of absolute temporal reference in antecedents and the high probability modals in consequents. The temporal and modal features expressed in the two positions are the semantic element closely related to the factuality of conditionals. They are effective clues to detect CF in Chinese conditionals. In addition, negation as a logic constant, also affect the understanding of CF. This research made an attempt to explore the deep semantic structure of conditional CF expressed by TAM; however, It should be noted that TAM are the logical element underlying the CF meaning of conditionals and words related to them are not the compulsory linguistic devices when express counterfactual meanings in Chinese.
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