Region - Educational Research and Reviews

Cheng and Huang's paper on donkey sentences has a great influence on analyzing the anaphoric relation in Chinese conditionals[1]. They propose that there are two types of conditionals: bare conditionals and ruguo/dou conditionals. These two conditionals have different anaphoric elements in relevant clauses and can be analyzed through two distinct strategies, namely unselective binding and E-type pronoun strategies [2]. However, exceptions exist. This paper aims to find out exceptions. After analyzing apparent exceptions both on bare conditionals and ruguo/dou conditionals, a possible solution provided by Pan and Jiang as a makeup to Cheng and Huang' paper will be shown [3]. They proposed that wh-phrases are preferential bound variables and most appropriate for showing a bare conditional, while pronouns are preferential to be an E-type pronoun and for most cases, which are appropriate for ruguo/dou conditionals. With the help of "Bound Variable Hierarchy", people will see not only a sentence itself but also see its context playing a role in its interpretation.