Abstract
This thesis investigates certain types of complex sentences in Mandarin Chinese. They are jishi/jiusuan concessive conditionals, suiran/jinguan concessives, and yinwei reason constructions. They correspond to sentences introduced by even if, although, and because in English respectively. First, we propose that Mandarin complex sentence constructions are actually licensed by elements in the consequence clauses, which is different from the phenomenon in English. Each licensing element, depending on its property, restricts the type of its antecedent clause. Jiu ‘then ’and cai ‘only if’, due to their relationality, suffice to form ruguo conditionals and yinwei constructions. Ye ‘also’ and haishi/rengran ‘still’ license concessives introduced by elements like jishi/jiusuan ‘even if’ or suiran/jinguan ‘even though/although’. These licensing elements in the second clause assert an extreme case from a set of alternatives. We also find jishi/jiusuan concessive conditionals can be divided into concessive event-conditionals and concessive premise-conditionals. Our analysis shows that apart from ye/haishi/rengran, non-indicative mood in a consequent clause license concessive premise-conditionals. Moreover, ye/haishi/rengran are also the crucial elements in conjunctive concessive-conditionals. For each construction, we adopt the tests from Comrie (2008) to investigate the syntactic properties of the antecedent clauses and consequent clauses. The tests in Lin (2012) are also adopted to show different adjuction positions of concessive event-conditionals and concessive premise-conditionals. Keywords: concessive-conditional clause, concessive clause, reason clause, licensing element, jiu, cai, ye, haishi/rengran, relationality, alternatives