The Study Of Interrogative Pronouns In Gansu’s Chinese Dialect

Gansu, located in the upper reaches of the Yellow River, is a provincialadministrative region of the People’s Republic of China. Adjacent to Shanxi in theeast, Sichuan and Qinghai in the south, Xinjiang in the west, Inner Mongolia andNingxia in the north, Gansu is the key land and gold section of the Ancient Silk Road.The name of Gansu is taken from the first words of Ganzhou (now Zhangye) andSuzhou (now Jiuquan). Gansu, the capital of which is Lanzhou, subordinates12prefecture-level cities and2autonomous prefectures. Gansu’s Chinese dialects arerespectively subordinate to Central Plains Mandarin, Lanyin Mandarin and SouthwestMandarin of Mandarin dialects. In this paper, interrogative pronouns of Central PlainsMandarin, Lanyin Mandarin in Gansu’s Chinese dialects are mainly discussed.The methods used in this article are mainly description and comparison.Description is the dominating part, and internal and external are compared moderately.Relevant theory and research results of modern Chinese grammar are used but notsticked to. Everything starts from the language itself. The interrogative pronouns ofGansu’s Chinese dialects are studied and compared by using survey, description,analysis, and comparison. The features of the pronouns are revealed so that Gansudialect’s internal consistency and differences of each part can be summarized moreprecisely.This article includes a total of six parts. The first part is the introduction,including geography and administrative divisions of Gansu Province, ethnicpopulation and historical evolution, the partitions of Gansu dialects, the overview ofeach part’s voice features, the history and current situation of Gansu dialect research,the relevant research of the interrogative pronouns of Gansu’s Chinese dialects, thepurpose and significance of the topic, research methods and corpus sources, phonetic symbols and style explanation, etc. The second and the third parts are the focus of thisarticle. The interrogative pronouns of Central Plains Mandarin, Lanyin Mandarin areintroduced from9areas, which are asking about persons, asking about things,showing deixis, asking about premises, asking about time, asking about quantities,asking about reasons and purposes, asking about properties and manners, asking aboutextents. The fourth part is the comparison of the internal and external of pronouns ofGansu dialects, including internal comparison of Gansu dialects, and the comparisonwith other dialect areas. The fifth part is an introduction to the use and function ofinterrogative pronouns, i.e. examples of interrogative and non-interrogative usage.The sixth part is the research of the source of several common interrogative pronounsof Gansu dialect, mainly including asking about persons (who), asking about things(what), showing deixis and asking about premises (where), and asking about reasonsand properties (why).