A Study On The Yes-No Measure Questions In Modern Chinese

The study of interrogative sentences is an important topic in Chinese studies at present.At present,the research on interrogative sentences mainly starts from the structural features,and pays little attention to interrogative sentences from the perspective of questioning degree.The systematic research on measuring interrogative sentences in modern Chinese has not yet started.This paper tries to take the measure questions in Lao She’s corpus and Wang Shuo’s corpus in CCL corpus as corpus,and analyzes the characteristics of measure questions in form,pragmatics and semantics on the basis of comprehensive and detailed description.First of all,this paper redefines measure questions from a functional point of view,proves the relationship between measure questions and question structure types from a preset point of view,and determines that the research object of this paper is "yes-no measure questions".Because measure question is the meaning type of interrogative sentence,and its questioning degree lies between interrogative sentence and rhetorical question,this paper puts forward the distinctive features of measure question and rhetorical question in form and meaning,and uses transformation analysis to distinguish measure question from interrogative sentence.Secondly,according to the different modal particles at the end of the sentence,we investigated the measurement usage of "ba","ma","a" and intonation questions without modal particles at the end of the sentence.Then,taking the word "ma" as an example,we concretely analyze the influence of the factors in the sentence other than the modal particles at the end of the sentence on the measurement question,and summarize the expression mode of the measurement usage of the "ma" question by focusing on the difference in form between the measurement question and the rhetorical question.Thirdly,this paper analyzes the pragmatic features of yes-no measure questions,and finds that "ma" measure questions and intonation measure questions have more similarities in context features,speaker’s subjective modality and emotional color,which are obviously complementary to "ba" measure questions.The "ma" measure question and intonation measure question are mainly used in non-neutral context to express "anti-expectation" subjective modality and negative emotional color,while the "ba" measure question is mainly used in neutral context to express "positive expectation" subjective modality and positive emotional color.Then,the pragmatic function of measure questions is studied,and it is considered that the core pragmatic function of measure questions is verification,which is also emphasized in different contexts,such as expressing thinking and self-reflection,providing assumptions,exploring reasons and eliciting topics.Finally,on the basis of pragmatic analysis,this paper discusses the meaning features of yes-no measure questions and tries to explain the reasons for the different pragmatic features of yes-no measure questions.Through investigation and analysis,we find that there are significant differences in semantic content among "ma" measure questions,intonation measure questions and "ba" measure questions.The former mostly expresses the speaker’s "possibility" judgment based on his direct experience such as vision and senses.While the latter is mostly used to express the judgment of "propriety" based on indirect experience."Possibility" and "ought to be" are related to the speaker’s "degree of confidence that the proposition may be established",and the speaker’s "degree of doubt" expressed by them also has hierarchical differences.To sum up,this paper analyzes the formal features,semantics and pragmatics of the yes-no measure questions from the perspective of three plane theories.This paper describes the formal features of the yes-no measure questions in as much detail as possible,and at the same time studies the semantic and pragmatic features of the yes-no measure questions in depth.