The Diachronic Development Of The Alternative Interrogative Sentence

The Alternative Interrogative is one of the sentence patterns that have been used since the early ancient times. In this thesis, it is explored from the diachronic viewpoint. Based on the recent semantics and pragmatics research findings, this thesis inspects the diachronic development of the Alternative Interrogative, generalizes its pattern features of different historical stages and then picks up the important clues of the whole evolutionary process. Focus on this questions from Song to Qing Dynasty ,the thesis put forward a statistical analysis of all the concerning data, and based on which, the Alternative Interrogatives are divided into three categories according to the alternative labels such as the conjunctives and the modals then canvassed it. Moreover, it is from three aspects to further discussed in the framework of the Presupposition theory and the theories of the Systemic Functional School: discusses the relationship of the choices of the Alternative Interrogatives from the perspectives of the syntactic structure and the semantic mode; Analyzes the functions of the questions and the rhetorical questions according to the systemic functional theories; analyzes the presupposition of the Alternative Interrogatives and the Positive and Negative Interrogatives under the guidance of the Presupposition theory with the purpose of presenting their distinctions.