A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Interrogatives: A Typological Perspective

This dissertation presents a thorough study of the interrogatives both in English and Chinese. The theoretical framework throughout this study is the Principles and Parameters Theory advanced by Noam Chomsky (1981, 1986, 1995, 2000), which is based upon the fundamental assumption that all languages, despite their superficial differences, share the same underlying structure and are equally subject to the constraints of the principles and parameters of Universal Grammar. Within the Principles and Parameters framework, language variation is accounted for in terms of parameters.Although the existence of interrogative constructions seems a universal property of natural languages, languages differ substantially in the strategies they employ for coding interrogatives. Pursing the Principles and Parameters Theory, our investigation of the interrogative systems has focused on the following questions: what is the range of parametric variation specific for interrogatives permitted in English and Chinese? In what components of the two languages are they to be found? What is the significance of the analysis for the class of natural languages as a whole?The language data studied in this thesis are the major types of English and Chinese interrogatives, including English yes-no questions, wh-questions, alternative questions, indirect questions, Chinese yes-no questions, wh-questions, alternative questions, A-not-A questions and indirect questions so that the various major patterns of interrogatives in the two languages have been given a unified treatment under the Principles and Parameters Theory. The application of the Principles and Parameters Theory to the analysis of the major interrogative patterns in both English and Chinese has further proved the universality of the theory.Built on the comparative analysis of the syntactic patterns of interrogatives in English and Chinese and their properties, the parameters that demonstrate cross-linguistic contrasts between these two typologically different interrogatives are discovered: English employs subject-auxiliary inversion while Chinese utilizes adjoining and reduplication. These parameters are proposed as being universally valid through comparing data from French, Japanese, Yi language and other natural languages. Therefore, the universal grammatical devices for processing interrogation are movement, adjoining and reduplication. Further investigation has been conducted in terms of the distribution of these syntactic devices for processing interrogation. Three sentential positions where the syntactic devices are employed have been discovered: sentence-initial position,...