A Contrastive Study Of Tag Question Between English And Chinese Based On Corpus

Tag question refers to the sentence structure of a declarative clause and a tag.The semantic function of a tag question in English is produced and developed bygrafting the speech act of an inquiry to the speech act of a declarative clause.Whether in English or in Chinese, tag question consists of a declarative and aninterrogative which is appended to the declarative. The interrogative refers to tag. InEnglish, tag questions are divided into two classes regarding to the tag: one is adeclarative clause and a complete tag question, or an abbreviate tag; the other is adeclarative clause with a tag which are not restricted by the person, tense of thepreceding declarative clause, that is to say, it may be a word, a phrase, or a shortsentence. While in Chinese, though the basic formation of the tag question is thesame, the tag part is not restricted by the declarative as that of in English.From the perspective of diachronic scope, the tag construction in English firstappeared in16to17centuries, consisting of a declarative and a tag (Visser). Whileon the construction of the tag question, some scholars (Stokwell et al) hold that thetag question in English is derived from two paralleled sentences. Other researchersconsider that the understratum of the tag question is a simple sentence plus a not orplacing a WH at the end. In China, researches related to tag question arecomparatively fewer, and mainly focus on literature studies. Major scholars includeLüShuxiang, Shao Jingmin, Xu Shenghuan and Niu Baoyi. And the focuses are onspecial sentence structure, pragmatic and semantic features.The frame of the thesis is as follows:Chapter One, Introduction, contains general introductions of the topic, includingresearch background, research questions and motivations. Chapter Two is literaturereview, presenting theories of the topics, definitions of TQ in both Chinese and English, as well as general studies of TQ. And Chapter Three shows features of TQin Chinese and English, introducing from syntactic, semantic and pragmaticfunctions. Chapter Four generally introduces histories of contrastive studies, and listsmethods of contrastive studies, some of which will be used in the thesis.Introspection and empirical studies are also introduced in Chapter Four, whichpresents importantly in the study. Chapter Five is the most important part of thewhole thesis, that is, the analysis of the two corpuses. Results of the corpus-basedstudies and contrastive studies of the corpus will be shown in this chapter. ChapterSix is the conclusion of the whole study, including major findings of the thesis, aswell as limitations of the studies.