A Comparative Analysis Of The Shift Of English And Chinese Special Interrogative Sentences

Since 1990s,wh-questions have received widespread attention in the study of syntax.A lot of new achievements have been made in the study of wh-questions from the cross-language perspective.Studies on wh-questions by scholars involve the relation between the quantifiers and the scope of wh-phrases.the relation of wh-words in situ and logic form-movement,the functional features of’ wh-words,the study on multiple wh-questions and so on.As for the problem of wh-words experiencing movement or just staying in situ in wh-questions,the agreement in linguistics basically at present falls on the movement of wh-words,but views on the level of movement and the elements of movement are different:it can take place in the Phonetic Form level as well as in the Logic Form level.The elements of movement can not only be the wh-word itself but also the invisible question operator contained in the wh-word.In a word,studies involved with wh-questions are going deeper and present a diversified trend of development.Under the framework of Minimalist Program,the thesis tries to compare the structures as well as the cases of wh-movement in English and Chinese wh-questions by using the feature checking theory.What the thesis aims to prove is that English and Chinese wh-questions are both constructed via some sorts of movements.Despite the divergences of wh-movement in English and Chinese wh-questions on the surface,that is,overt wh-movement in English and covert logic form-movement in Chinese,there are great similarities between them.Both of the two kinds of wh-movement are all related to be motivated by feature checking and phonetic form and logic form realization.A comparative analysis on the two languages-English and Chinese,is not only very helpful to our study of Universal Grammar,but also very useful for us to study divergent word orders of different languages,which may have very profound influence on translation,second language acquisition as well as mutual communication and so on.To be clear about how the wh-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 with the expression and comprehension as well as the nature of the language.A comparative analysis on word orders of various languages is very helpful to our further research on language universalities and individualities.