A Comparative Study On English Wh-Adverbs And Their Chinese Corresponding Forms

English wh-adverbs and their Chinese corresponding forms have the features of common adverbs. Both of them can play a role as common adverbs. English wh-adverbs include "when", "where", "why" and "how". According to the differences of syntactic function, those words can be divided into two major groups:relative adverbs which introduce different types of clauses and interrogative adverbs which introduce interrogative sentences. On the basis of whether it has the features and can play a role as common adverbs or not, the author chooses "Heshi (when)", "Nali (where)", "Zenmeyang (how)" and "Weishenme (why)" as the Chinese corresponding forms of English wh-adverbs.English wh-adverbs and their Chinese corresponding forms have generality on syntactic structure and syntactic function and both of them can express the same meaning in sentences. This paper's analysis of similarities and differences is based on inductive methods and with the guidance of the general theory and methods of contrastive linguistics, the structuralism theory and Chomsky's Universal Grammar as the basis. This paper mainly compares and analyzes the similarities and differences on syntactic structure; syntactic function and semantic relation feature three aspects and then explains the reasons.This paper contains four aspects. The first chapter is the introduction, which introduces the aim, significance, contents and method of this research. Based on previous research, this chapter raises questions of this paper. The second chapter introduces the definition of English and Chinese wh-adverbs, then divided them into two groups according their syntactic function. Chapter three is contrastive research of English and Chinese relative adverbs. Compares and analyzes the similarities and differences on syntactic structure, syntactic function and semantic relation feature of main clauses and clauses in compound structures on the basis of same content of the sentences. Chapter four is the research of English and Chinese interrogative adverbs. Compares and analyzes their similarities and differences on syntactic structure and syntactic function in interrogative sentences, then analyzes semantic relation between interrogative adverbs and predicate verbs or subject.The final part is the conclusion. There are common features between English and Chinese wh-adverbs. Firstly, both of them can be generated at the position of adjunct in D-structure. Secondly, they can be modifiers of verb phrases or the whole sentence. Thirdly, their semantic features are restricted by semantic features of the head word of the maximal projection which contains them. The similarities and differences on syntactic structure is the reason of the similarities and differences on syntactic function and semantic relation feature.