Sự lựa chọn không gian tinh thần trong các câu điều kiện tiếng Việt

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to apply the theory of “mental spaces ’ offered by Fauconnier
and other linguists who follow the cognitive approach in analyzing various aspects of
Vietnamese conditional sentences. From this point of view, nêu conjunction plays a role as the space builder for conditional spaces. Being on this mental spaces, the speaker present her prediction on future perspectives. This is the specific characteristic of a kind of common Vietnamese conditionals that can be called as predictive conditionals. Two clauses of this kind of sentences describe (or imply) events or state of affairs in the real world. The relation between the protasis and the apodosis is the causal one: the conditional space introduced in the protasis is the cause or the factor that allows the speaker to predict possible consequences interpreted in the apodosis. Apparently, semantics and contextual factors are very necessary in analyzing predictive conditionals as well as other kinds conditionals.