A Study Of 'X Shi Shui?' And 'Shui Shi X?'

'X shi shui?'and'Shui shi X?'are two sentence patterns in people's daily life to ask about someone. This thesis analyzes relatively all-round the similarities and difference of the two sentence patterns from the view of syntax, semantics and pragmatics based on the analysis of the use frequencies and lexical form of X. It also compares these two sentence patterns with their correspondent patterns in English.This thesis is comprised of five chapters.Chapter One mainly introduces the research background and purposes.Chapter Two mainly studies the use frequency of these two sentence patterns. And it is found that the use frequency of'X shi shui?'is much higher than that of'Shui shi X?'. This is because of the rule of new and old information delivery. Also in this chapter, the writer classifies the lexical forms appearing in'X'. Meanwhile, the writer studies the word distribution in these two sentence patterns. It is discovered that different types of'X'have different distribution in the two sentence patterns.Chapter Three mainly adopts the Set Theory in formal semantics. Combining with the logic relationship of'Shi', the writer analyzes the semantic difference of the two sentence patterns. It is found that'Shui shi X?'tends to demand a distinguising answer while'X shi shui?'tends to demand explanary answer. Strong denotational expression tends to appear in'X shi shui?', however, strong cannotational expression tends to appear in'Shui shi X?'.Chapter Four mainly focuses on discourse analysis. It is found that the harmoniousness of the answer in grammatical form is the significant reason leading to people's confusion of the two sentence patterns. To have a distinguishing or explanary answer of the two sentence patterns are not completely decided by the location of'X'in a sentence. Rather, other factors will play a role in make decisions here such as the context, the relationship of people involved, the semantic information'X'delivers, the information transferred by people who answer. The writer particularly studies the usages of these two sentence patterns as rhetorical question. In this case, the different usages of these two sentence patterns originate from whether it is distinguishing or explanary.Chapter Five studies the corresponding expression of these two sentence patterns in English—'who is X?'and'X is who?'. It is discovered that they two are either distinguishing or explanary functionally.