Chinese and English counterfactuals: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis revisited

Abstract

Bloom (1981) found that Chinese speakers were less likely than English speakers to give counterfactual interpretations to a counterfactual story. These findings, together with the presence of a distinct counterfactual marker (the subjunctive) in English, but not in Chinese, were interpreted as evidence for the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. A series of five studies was designed to replicate these findings, using both Chinese and English versions of a new counterfactual story as well as the story used by Bloom. In these studies, bilingual Chinese showed little difficulty in understanding either story in either language, insofar as the English and Chinese were idiomatic. For one story, the Chinese bilinguals performed better in Chinese than American subjects did in English. Nearly monolingual Chinese who did not know the English subjunctive also gave mostly counterfactual responses. These findings suggest that the mastery of the English subjunctive is probably quite tangenital to counterfactual reasoning in Chinese. In short, the present research yielded no support for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. © 1983.