A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Interrogatives Zenme And How

Interrogative words are the important means of transmitting enquiring information and the study of interrogative words 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. Zenme and how are usually classified as interrogative adverbs by scholars and they are important members of interrogative words. Both zenme and how can substitute for unknown information, express interrogation and form interrogative sentences. On the basis of these similarities in syntactic function, this thesis describes and contrasts the interrogative usages and non-interrogative usages of the two words under the guidance of the basic theories of cognitive linguistics and contrastive linguistics.There is not a systematic analysis of contrast of zenme and how from the syntactical angle by now. From the study of this thesis, we find that the most basic and flexible usage of zenme and how is to ask for reason and manner as the adverbial in an interrogative sentence. Both of them can form single-word questions and express interrogation. But they do not correspond one-to-one syntactically and semantically in many cases. Zenme can perform as a predicate and attributive in a certain grammatical environment. How can enquire for measure and degree as the adverbial and it can also perform as predicative. This thesis not only lists the syntactic functions of the two words but also makes analysis of their correspondence in translation, word orders and ways to intensify interrogation.Both zenme and how have non-interrogative usages:for exclamation, rhetoric questions and arbitrary reference. Zenme can be used for subjunctive reference and how is not used in this way. In describing the non-interrogative usages, we find the interrogative usages and non-interrogative usages are not completely separated, and there are many things they share in common semantically and syntactically, for example, some rhetoric questions or exclamation sentences formed by zenme are no different with its interrogative sentence, so we need to borrow the context and punctuation marks in order to settle the meaning.The thesis makes a comparative analysis to zenme and how from two aspects:interrogative usages and non-interrogative usages. Through plenty of linguistic examples, we find that they share similarities in many syntactic aspects. But they do not correspond semantically. Zenme and how have different meanings in different structures and grammatical environment. Compared with other interrogative words, zenme and how are more flexible in meaning and their corresponding forms. During the descriptions and analyses of the two words, this thesis also tries to make explanations to some linguistic phenomenon in the hope to enrich the study of interrogative words and the Chinese-English contrastive study.