An OT Account Of The Typological Differences Between English And Chinese Interrogatives

This thesis presents a contrastive analysis of the sentence patterns for English and Chinese interrogatives within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT) proposed by Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky in 1990s. The previous researches on interrogatives are mainly done on the basis of Chomsky's Principle-Parameter Theory, in which the universal principles and specific parameter-settings are the main concern of the scholars who study the typological variations in interrogative sentence patterns. This thesis, however, tends to conduct a contrastive analysis of the English and Chinese interrogatives from a brand-new perspective—OT. OT explains the typological differences between languages through exploring the different hierarchical rankings of constraints in different languages. Both the universality and particularity possessed by certain types of language can be revealed through OT analysis.The existence of interrogative constructions seems to be a universal property of natural languages, but those languages also differ greatly in the strategies they employ for coding interrogatives. This thesis takes English and Chinese interrogatives as the research subject and attempts to answer the following questions: (i) what constraints control the generation of both English and Chinese interrogatives? (ii) what kinds of hierarchical systems of constraints lead to the typological differences in the interrogative sentence patterns between English and Chinese languages? (iii) what are the deep-rooted reasons underlying those typological differences?This thesis adopts the categorization of interrogatives made by Quick (1985) and Zhu Dexi (1982) and explores three major types of English and Chinese interrogatives: yes-no questions, wh-questions and alternative questions. The typological differences between English and Chinese interrogatives are generalized as follows: in terms of yes-no questions, English has"auxiliary + subject"model whereas Chinese has"declarative + (ma)"model; in terms of wh-questions, English has"wh-word + auxiliary"model whereas Chinese has"wh-in-situ + (ne/a)"model; in terms of alternative questions, English has"auxiliary + subject"model where Chinese has"declarative + (ne/a)"model.Based on syntactic theories, the constraints on the generation of English and Chinese interrogatives are discovered, including HD-MOVE, DO-INSERT, OP-SPEC, OB-HD, ECONOMY & STAY, among which the former five belong to markedness constraints which trigger change and/or movement whereas the last one belongs to faithfulness constraint which prevents change and movement from happening.In Chapter Six, it is further found that the above mentioned constraints are ranked differently for the three types of English and Chinese interrogatives as follows: the constraint rankings for English and Chinese yes-no questions are respectively {HD-MOVE >> DO-INSERT >> ECONOMY >> STAY} and {ECONOMY >> HD-MOVE >> STAY }; the constraint rankings for English and Chinese wh-questions are respectively {OP-SPEC >> OB-HD >> ECONOMY >> STAY} and {ECONOMY >> OP-SPEC >> OB-HD >> STAY}; the constraint rankings for English and Chinese alternative questions are respectively {HD-MOVE >> DO-INSERT >> ECONOMY >> STAY} and {ECONOMY >> HD-MOVE >> STAY}. It is just these differences in hierarchies of constraints that lead to the typological differences in interrogative sentence patterns between English and Chinese languages. It is proved with examples that the optimal interrogative candidates evaluated and selected by these hierarchical rankings of constraints coincide with the interrogative models summarized in Chapter Four.Furthermore, based on the findings in the previous chapters, this thesis summarizes three general typological tendencies of English and Chinese interrogatives and attempts to interpret these tendencies from linguistic, cognitive and social-cultural perspectives.This thesis is concluded by pointing out that OT analysis of the typological differences between English and Chinese interrogatives is more persuasive and effective than previous approaches and makes a necessary complement to the previous researches. It is hoped that this study can provide some enlightenment for further researches on syntactic phenomena.