A General Analysis On The Transformation Of Rhetorical Sentences Forms In Classical Chinese And Modern Vernacular Before And After May Fourth Movement

The period around May Fourth Movement was a transitional period between contemporary Chinese and modern Chinese. During this period, the linguistic phenomenon was varied and complex. This thesis aims to reflect the process of changes in its using condition through a detailed description of the use of rhetorical questions in the papers during this period. And the ultimate aim is to explain written text syntax conversion motives and mechanisms.This thesis includes four parts.The fist part is the introduction, which gives us a brief view of the topic's significance and current conditions, to clarify the research method and the origin of language resources, and make a brief introduction of some relative terms.The second part is a detailed description of the rhetorical sentence's using condition in these three periods, and analysis with examples. The aim of this chapter is to give us a clear understanding of the rhetorical questions' using conditions in each period. Moreover, this chapter, from diachronic perspective, makes some relevant explanations to the emergency, development, evolution of the interrogative pronouns, emotional adverbs, modal particle, etc. adopted in example sentences which tries to have a concentrated and general understanding of the development of the rhetorical question's elements.The third part is the key of this thesis. At first, we draw eight statistical tables about the usage frequency of the special-pointed rhetorical sentence, yes-or-no rhetorical questions, and interrogative modal particles. It aims to have a formal and objective understanding of the usage of rhetorical sentence at each period. And make preparation for the late statistical analysis. Then, we make a comparison and analysis, according to difference of their usage frequency, interrogative pronouns, form marks, and modal particle. By so doing, we have discovered some changes and development in the uses of some rhetorical questions. These changes and development mainly include the following four aspects: the increase, the decline, or the stability of their usage frequency, and the emergency of new forms of rhetorical questions. Finally, we make relevant explanations to these changes and development, believing that the increase of modern rhetorical sentences, the decrease of traditional rhetorical sentences are generally attributed to external and internal reasons. As for external reasons, it is due to the May Fourth "new culture movement '"s avocation for modern language as well as the influences of thoughts .The internal reasons are the strictness of syntax, disyllablization of vocabularies, and so on.The fourth part is a conclusion of the thesis .It makes a general conclusion of the thesis' viewpoints and points out the thesis' limitations waiting to be improved in future studies.