Modern Chinese Rhetorical Study

Rhetorical question is a commonly used tape with various sentence pattern and complicate function in Chinese. Scholars have successively announced a series of thesis. However, there are many problems that are worth probing into. Such as the relationship between rhetorical question and general interrogation sentence in syntactic structure, the relationship between rhetorical question and declarative in syntactic structure, the form of marker or no marker for rhetorical question, intensity of rhetorical question, responses systems to rhetorical question, function of rhetorical question and so on. So we select rhetorical question as our study object, and try to make farther study on form, semantic and pragmatic of rhetorical question based on former study.This thesis include four parts:In the first chapter, we study the differences among rhetorical question, declarative and general interrogation sentence in the form of syntactic structure. We study these differences basing on contrast analysis and variation analysis. Besides, we explain how the differences form.In the second chapter, we probe into intensity of rhetorical question. We think that the intensity of rhetorical question have relationship with structural tape of rhetorical question and objective of communication, which are two important factors. Except for these, factors such as the inner structural form of little tape in rhetorical question, the person, responses systems to rhetorical question, function of rhetorical question all influence the intensity of rhetorical question. We select a lot of corpus to describe and classify in order to probe into these factors which influence intensity better.In the third chapter, we make a full description about responses systems to rhetorical question. We divide the systems into two important tapes.In the fourth chapter, we study pragmatic function of rhetorical question in such aspect as connection between form and function. Besides, we probe in to subject -person which influences responses systems to rhetorical question.