A Contrastive Study On English And Mongolian Interrogative Sentences

This paper aims to compare the English and Mongolian yes-no question,information question, alternative question from syntactic structure under frameworkof Principle-Parameter Theory advanced by Noam Chomsky.By analyzing syntactic patterns of Mongolian and English interrogatives, the majorfindings can be summarized as below:(i) English interrogative sentences applysubject-auxiliary inversion whilst Mongolian interrogative sentences maintain in-situ.(ii) Mongolian yes-no question requires question particle to generate interrogativesentence, and the question particle can be combined with former word to expressdifferent attitudes or moods. Yet, there is no so called question particle exists inEnglish interrogatives.(iii) Stress is playing unexpectedly pivotal role in utterance ofMongolian yes-no question. Conversely, English yes-no question is much lessdependent on the stress to understand the sentence meaning.(iv) The position ofinterrogative pronoun is rather flexible in the Mongolian information interrogatives,while the English interrogative pronoun always locates in the head of thewh-interrogatives.Notwithstanding, English and Mongolian are from different language families,apart from the striking divergences, there are some interesting phenomena showingtheir similarities.(i) Rising tone is the prevailing trend in most standard English andMongolian yes-no questions.(ii) As a syntactic operation, the interrogative movementis universal in both English and Mongolian information question.(iii) The word orderof English and Mongolian alternative question are identical with the ir word order ofyes-no/information question respectively.(iv)The information focus can be omittedin later alternative for simplification’s sake inboth languages’ alternative questions.Therefore, findings of this research will not only more or less helpful forMongolian students to get a clearer perspective of divergences and similaritiesbetween English and Mongolian，but also have positive impact on cross-linguisticstranslation, culture communication and so on.