On Interrogative Sentences In "A Lantern By The Forked Road" ("Qilu Deng")

A Lantern by the Forked Road (Qilu Deng) is a colloquial novel about the social life in Henan province in the early Qing Dynasty, written by Li Luyuan(1707-1790) in Henan dialect. This book, in which there are more than 600 thousand words, 108 chapters, was approximately written during 1749-1778. This dissertation will do a thorough research in the question patterns appearing in this book. At the same time, comparing with the question patterns in Shuihu Story (Shuihu Zhuan) and A Dream of the Red Mansion(Honglou Meng), this dissertation will make a close description and analysis of various structural patterns, features and distributions of the northern dialects in the early Qing Dynasty, mainly the Henan dialectal questions appearing in A Lantern by the Forked Road. Furthermore, it will analyze the cause of formation and the ebbs and flows of different types of questions from the perspective of the history of Chinese language. Lastly, from the perspectives of syntax, semantics, pragmatics and the Chinese dialect, it will discuss the features and the roles of the questions in A Lantern by the Forked Road that have played in the whole development of question patterns.There are altogether six chapters in this dissertation. The first chapter is an introduction, which will present the literature review of A Lantern by the Forked Road and the method of research in this dissertation. The second chapter will be a detailed description and analysis of the conjugation of the interrogative words and model particles in the particular referring interrogatives. The third and fourth chapter will discuss the yes-or-no questions and the choice questions respectively and their track of development and evolution. The fifth chapter will describe and analyze the particular referring, yes-or-no answering and the choice making of the rhetorical questions. The last chapter will mainly analyze the presuppositonal questions and draw a conclusion of this dissertation. In my opinion, the transitional feature and the Henan local colorism in A Lantern by the Forked Road are really obvious.