The Syntactic Comparison Between English And French Interrogative Sentences

The syntactic comparison of interrogative sentences between English and French in this dissertation is carried out within the framework of TG Theory. By so doing, the author aims to find out their similarities and differences and to find out whether the derivation of French interrogative sentences also satisfies UG (universal grammar). First, the detailed theoretical basis for the thesis is given, including the introduction to category theory, X-bar theory, checking theory, head movement and operator movement, all of which will be used to compare the English interrogative sentences and French interrogative sentences. Then the four types of interrogative sentences in English and French, namely, general questions, special questions, alternative questions and tag questions, are compared. During the comparing process, interrogative sentences are divided into contraposition groups. For general questions, there are more similarities than differences: both of them involve head movement; both of them undergo inversion; both of them have echo questions; and in both of them, the last resort is used; and both of them could be checked by checking theory. For special questions, both English and French special questions are CPs headed by C constituent containing an interrogative affix Q which has a [wh] specifier checked by movement of wh-word to spec-CP. Other constituents are pied-pied along with the wh-word only if this is required for convergence. Besides, there exist wh-in-situ phenomena. For alternative questions, since the formation of English and French alternative questions is similar, and since the alternative part in both languages could be analyzed as CONJP (conjunction phrase) which belongs to one category, the result is obvious that they are similar. For the last kind, they are different: English has tag questions and the tag questions have varieties, while French doesn't have a term named "tag question" and has only one form n'est-ce pas for any person and any tense.Such illustration and comparison, although not perfect, shows that the derivation of English interrogative questions is similar to that of French interrogative questions, both basically in accordance with man's cognitive competence.