Modern Chinese Interrogative Pragmatics

The interrogative sentences, one of the four sentence categories in modernChinese, have special pragmatic value in the speech communication. However,enough attention has not been paid to them, especially not to their pragmatic value.According to the materials gathered by the author, few people have done systematicand pragmatic research on the subjects.Therefore, based on the work of other researchers, the author tries to study themcomprehensively with basic principles of pragmatics, such as presupposition, focus,conversation pattern and speech act, and generalizes some basic rules and putsforward some new opinions. The author intends to draw a systematic conclusion inthe pragmatic research of interrogative sentences through his analysis and study.Pragmatics in interrogative sentence involves many aspects and seven of themare included in the article.Chapter One, the preface, introduces the value and significance of the topic, thecurrent situation of the related research as well as the researching techniques appliedin this paper.Chapter Two, after discussing the delimitation of questions, introduces somedifferent views on the internal classification of interrogative sentence in detail andputs forward the pragmatic classification systems.Chapter Three, mainly analyses the presupposition of yes-or-no questions,alternative questions, positive and negative questions and wh-questions. Thenapplication of presupposition of questions in speech communication is discussed.Chapter Four, mainly analyses the focuses of yes-or-no questions, alternativequestions, positive and negative questions as well as wh-questions afterdistinguishing focuses in the broad sense and narrow sense.Chapter Five, mainly studies the types of direct speech acts and those of theindirect speech acts of questions, and explains with the prototype theory why thequestions have colorful speech acts.Chapter Six does research on the functions of the questions in a conversation and a text. In a conversation, the questions can restrict not only the semantic meaning ofthe conversation but also its structure. In the text, the questions are rich not only inthe writings rhetoric functions but also in semantic ones.The conclusion part points out some problems that may exist in this paper and thepragmatic aspects that have not been involved in it.