A Contrastive Analysis Of Interrogative Movement In English And Chinese

By comparing the structures as well as the movement cases of English and Chinese information questions, this paper aims to prove that English wh-questions and Chinese specific ones are both constructed via some sorts of movements. And despite the divergences of movements in English and Chinese information questions, there are great similarities between them. A contrastive analysis of these two question types is not only very helpful to our study of UG, but also very useful for us to study divergent word orders of different languages, which may have very profound influence on translation, L2 acquisition as well as mutual communications, and so on.To be clear about why the parameter setting of the interrogative movement has different ways, and how the interrogative movement is achieved in different languages are quite important to our further linguistic research. Word order of a language is not only related to structural description in syntax, but is closely linked to the expressions and comprehension as well as the nature of the language. A contrastive analysis on word orders of various languages is very helpful to further research on language universalities and individualities.This paper is divided into six chapters. Chapter One is an overall discussion on studies over interrogative movement. Movement is taken as a fundamental operation in syntactic computations to transform an original sentence into a target structure. And interrogative movement, one of the most basic movement operations is overt in English information questions while it is covert in Chinese ones. But despite the divergences of movements in English and Chinese information questions, there are great similarities between them.Chapter Two begins the discussion by illustrating basic properties of English and Chinese information questions, and provides a basic structural interpretation to those two question configurations, about their different external structures, various grammatical patterns as well as their general functions. Chapter Three puts forward a contrast between those two question types, covering several aspects of formational divergences between the two languages. This chapter presents a series of contrastive analyses of English and Chinese information questions on their movement patterns, language natures, and grammatical computation characteristics, trying to show similarities between the two interrogative configurations under the apparent differences on the surface.Then in Chapter Four, the eventual formal and transformational divergences are placed within a set of syntactic devices used by both languages to prove the universality of interrogative movement in English and Chinese. Interrogative movement, whether an overt structural dislocation or a covert semantic transference, universally concerns feature checking and also relies on PF & LF realization according to FI principle.Chapter Five discusses some possible constraints on interrogative movement, and provides an explanation for motivations of those two movement patterns. Any movement is tightly constrained by some conditions, such as islands or subjacency principle. Constraints on wh-movement and LF-movement are generally the same, except for some divergences according to different computational operations the two languages adopt.The last chapter includes a summary of the whole paper and finally arrives at a conclusion that both English and Chinese information questions are generated through movements. The covert LF-movement in modern Chinese also has an origin of overt interrogative movement in ancient Chinese. Since these two question patterns are both derived from the SVO structure, these two interrogative configurations must have some relations in essence.