Construing Epistemic Biases Of Polar And Bipolar Questions In English And Chinese

A speech act is an utterance which has both propositional meaning and illocutionary force. Epistemic bias acts as an illocutionary effect which is necessary for students to understand. Polar questions and bipolar questions are two most widely used interrogative forms in both Chinese and English questions. The author tries to construe epistemic biases of polar and bipolar questions in English and Chinese to help students have better understanding and better communication.Generally speaking, polar questions imply the speaker's point of view while bipolar questions always express an ambiguous and neutral stance. Positive polar questions with positive orientation can accept assertive form whereas nonassertive forms may be used in negative polar questions and cause negative orientation. However, many elements may influence the epistemic bias of a question, such as:polarity items and intonation, etc.After mentioning at the outset the background, objectives and organization of the thesis, the author gives a brief account of the definition and classification of questions. Then we present a review of various approaches to question, e.g. functionalist approach, formalist approach and syntactic, pragmatic approach. Based on the notion of "enriched composition" put forward by Jackendoff (2002), where the phrasal or sentential semantics is yielded by the interplays among various tiers in conceptual structures, the polarity items interact with negation at the lexical structure tier, changing the "co-compositional" contexts of questions. The context-changing forces of negative polarity items and positive polarity items are revealed in the given "enriched composition" model. This explanatory model can further explain why some polarity items can reverse the polarity or bias in the questions, and why others are ruled out by the exclusive bias condition.The final chapter makes a conclusion of major findings, significance, limitations of the study and suggestion for future researches. The author hopes the study can help to train and develop students'intercultural awareness and to cultivate students'communicative competence.