A Study Of Interrogatives As Subject And Object

Interrogative sentences are the sentences defined by the pragmatic objects (mood) of sentences. In 1980s, Lv Shuxiang focused on the establishment of the mood systems, and made elaborate analysis about mood in"中國文法要略". His study led the study of interrogatives into a relatively detailed and profound level, and laid the foundation for the study of interrogatives in Chinese. Since then, Chinese interrogatives had become one of the hot topics among the linguistic scholars in China. However, generally speaking, the past studies on the interrogatives mainly focused on the internal structure about the sentences, without an elaborate study on their sentential function. Most of the studies about the interrogatives functioning as subjects or objects are studied case by case, which lacks comprehensiveness and systematicness. Therefore, it is quite necessary to have systematic studies on the sentential function of Chinese interrogatives. We have tried to probe into the phenomenon, which interrogatives function as subjects and objects, and we presented some new views, hoping that interrogatives can be understood more deeply and precisely.The chapter states the brief view about the phenomenon relating to interrogatives used as objects. It first compares embedded interrogative clauses with interrogative sentences, and identifies the sentential characteristics about interrogatives on the object position; then it discusses the semantic category of the verbs which interrogatives can follow as the object, and draws a conclusion: When a verb is followed by interrogatives as an object, verbs of different categories have different restrictions on the selection interrogatives and subjects, and its own sentential performance will also be different.Furthermore, when interrogatives act as an object, the mood that expressed by the complex sentences is interested by many scholars. The essay attempts to explain that from the aspect of the controllability of predicate verbs: when the verb is a verb with weak controllability, the complex sentences may express a declarative mood or a interrogative mood, and it is subjected to the relating form of the predicate verb in the main clause; when the verb is a verb with strong controllability, the complex sentences can only express an interrogative mood most of the time.The fourth chapter describes the phenomenon connecting with the interrogatives act as subjects. We found that when the interrogative acts as a subject, the structural components used as predicate are mainly static verbs, and a small number of adjectives or subject-predicate phrases. However, verbs acting as predicates are most common, and the whole sentence states an eternal truth or fact. The interrogatives in the subject position are nominalized semantically, and usually they take the semantic role as agent and patient. Based on the discussion mentioned above, we compared the interrogatives act as objects with those act as subjects, and we believe the later are more restricted.