A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Interrogative Pronouns

Interrogative pronouns,just as the term suggests,are pronouns that express information of interrogations.They are the important means of transmitting enquiring information and the study of interrogative pronouns is now playing a decisive role in the linguistic field.Scholars at home and abroad all have done tremendous descriptions,explanations and researches in this field.Most domestic linguists lay more emphasis on the description and classification of linguistic phenomena.Detailed as the classifications are,they haven't reached a consensus on a united opinion;on the contrary,western scholars usually pay more attention to the formulation of the theoretical structure in the hope that it may be suitable for all languages.Their formulae are well-knit,but the disadvantage is obvious.Each language family,its branch or even each language has its individual grammatical mechanism.If we apply the same structure to all languages mechanically and leave all exceptions aside, then it is hard to avoid mistakes.Combining the domestic and international achievements,this thesis tries to make descriptions and explanations to Chinese and English interrogative pronouns,especially shui and who,using the general theories of contrastive linguistics and cognitive linguistics.Then the reasons and trends of their development are expounded on the basis of grammaticalization.Contrasting their similarities and differences,the thesis tries to achieve the combination of phenomenon description and theory explanation.Shui and who both enjoy the high rate of usages.In Chinese,shui is defined as an indefinite personal interrogative pronoun,and the English who is in the same word category and has similar usages.Therefore,from the perspective of contrastive linguistics,shui and who satisfy the essential basis of comparison.The thesis makes a comparative analysis to shui and who from two aspects:interrogative usages and non-interrogative usages.Through plenty of linguistic examples,we find that they share similar interrogative usages,but differ in their non-interrogative usages due to different syntactic restrictions.What's more,because of the same cognitive model shared by human beings,shui and who have gone through similar developing paths in their usages.That is,interrogative usages are their basic usages,and non-interrogative usages like arbitrary reference and subjunctive reference are extended through the progress of grammaticalization.This grammaticalizational process is a process in which objective meanings gradually reduce,subjunctive meanings increase and interrogative signs disintegrate.In this process,interrogative pronouns come through usages in certain highly restrained local contexts to be reanalyzed as having non-interrogative usages or pragmatic functions.Making a relatively comprehensive comparison of interrogative and non-interrogative usages between shui and who,this thesis gives a full analysis to their similarities and differences in usages.Moreover,it reveals the deeper reasons of their usages change,which gets to the height of human cognition.It also provides the interrogative word study and contrastive linguistics with a new perspective,offers new materials for relevant studies,and achieves the combination of phenomenon description and theoretical study.