A Study On The Subjectivity Of Choice Questions In Modern Chinese

The subjectivity and subjectivation of language is one of the focuses of linguistic research,and this paper is to study the subjectivity of choice questions in modern Chinese.The question sentence is not an objective fact,but a personal question."Doubt" is a subjective factor concerning the speaker’s psychology;"Question" indicates that it is a two-way communication activity,which is more subjective and communicative.Chapter one is the introduction,which gives an account of the research object,the current status and the content of research.It reviews and evaluates the current situation of research on choice questions in modern Chinese from synchronic and diachronic perspectives,and gives an overview of subjectivity and subjectivation theories.It also compares the research results on the subjectivity of choice questions and summarizes their shortcomings.The research content and chapter organization of this paper are determined in view of the shortcomings of existing researches with the explanation of the sources of the corpus in the end.Chapters two to six are the case studies of this paper.This paper classifies multiple-choice questions based on their linguistic features,but does not intend to exhaustively list each type and examine their subjectivity characteristics category by category.It only selects the more subjective types of inquiry,rhetorical,questioning,evaluation,and newly emerged choice questions to explore.Chapter three examines the subjectivity and subjectivation of the inquiry-type choice questions.The subjective nature of choice questions is examined mainly in terms of perspective,perception,and emotion.The process of subjectivization of choice questions is mainly a subjective choice at the synchronic level to achieve communicative purposes.Chapter three explores the subjectivity of rhetorical type choice questions.Rhetorical questions are strongly subjective questions,and their subjectivity is mainly reflected in four aspects:interactivity,subjective negativity,reasoning continuum,and emotional tendency.The rhetorical question arises from the interaction between two parties,and expresses subjective negation.Its negation mode and object are also subject to the subjective point of view,and expresses a negative evaluation stance with special characteristics of stance expression.Chapter four examines the subjectivity of self posed and answered question type.Instead of focusing on the marker components that reflect the subjectivity of the speakers,this paper focuses on the strategies that reflect their subjectivity.It mainly analyzes the subjectivity characteristics from four aspects:focus highlighting at the grammatical level,discourse presupposition at the content level,paraphrasing strategy at the discourse mode level and metaphor strategy at the rhetorical level.Chapter five focuses on evaluation-type choice questions.This paper does not classify evaluation-type choice questions as exclamatory sentences,but as a special subcategory of rhetorical questions.Unlike the subjective negativity of rhetorical questions,the subjective negativity expressed in these questions is a kind of pseudo-negativity,which aims to express strong feelings or cognitive judgments about behaviors,as well as things or real situations that are beyond conventional expectations or knowledge and experience.This chapter focuses on four aspects:formal features,formation mechanism,ideational features and functional value.Chapter six is a newly-emerged type of more specific choice questions,"Is it A or is it A?"It is the result of the speakers’ need to highlight their tendency and pursue innovative and unfamiliar expressions on the basis of general choice questions,with obvious subjectivity and vividness.The chapter focuses on four aspects:structure,semantics,pragmatic types,formation motives and mechanisms.Chapter seven concludes the subjectivity characteristics of various types of choice questions based on the examination of five cases,and conducts internal consistency analysis and comparison of subjectivity strengths and weaknesses.Chapter eight draws the main conclusions of the whole paper,points out the innovations and shortcomings,and clarifies the direction of future research.The goal of this paper is to conduct a multi-faceted and multi-angle study of modern Chinese itemized choice questions with subjectivization and its related theories as the guide.By revealing the subjectivity of the choice questions mainly through case study analysis,which is supported by overall analysis,the characteristics of the choice questions can be shown in greater depth,providing corresponding support for the ontological study and application teaching of the choice questions.