Comparative Study Of Chinese And Thai Interrogative Sentences

This paper comparatively studies Chinese and Thai yes-or-nointerrogative sentence (including positive and negative interrogativesentence), specific interrogative sentence and alternative interrogativesentence from syntax and pragmatics. Through comparative analysis, wefound that Chinese and Thai interrogative sentences are very similar onthe macro-structure, but there are many differences at the micro level. Forexample, numbers of Chinese and Thai interrogative words and theirsources and part of speech are quite different. Chinese and Thai yes-or-nointerrogative sentence are both developed from positive and negative typealternative interrogative sentence; it can be seen as different deletionvariants of positive and negative alternative interrogative sentence, butthe deleted composition are very different. Alternative conjunctions arenot retained in Chinese, but most are retained in Thai language. Usage ofinterrogative pronouns are basically the same when used as subject andobject in the sentence, while they are quite different when used asattributive, adverbial, complement and predicate composition. Forassociated words in alternative interrogative sentence, Chinese has theword "shi" which shows emphasis. Both Chinese and Thai interrogativesentence have a variety of pragmatic functions, such as: inquiring,speculating, suspecting, greeting, inviting, suggesting, requesting,blaming, satirizing and mocking, but in expressing specific pragmaticfunctions, there are subtle differences in Chinese and Thai. Finally, basedon the similarities and differences of Chinese and Thai interrogativesentences and combining with the author’s personal experience inlearning Thai language and communicating with Thai people as well as in the process of teaching, this paper analyzes the existing difficulties in theteaching of Chinese and Thai interrogative sentences, and proposes somecorresponding teaching strategies.