The Interrogative System Of Shanghai Dialect And The Syntactic Analysis Of Its Interrogative Markers

Previous studies in interrogative sentences of Shanghai dialect have mainlyfocused on the description of language materials. The corpus observed is primarilyfrom the end of the19thcentury to the1980s, while our knowledge of contemporaryinterrogative system of Shanghai dialect is deficient. In this thesis, we make aclassification in respect of the interrogative system, describe its historicaldevelopment and status quo specifically, and display the distribution rules ofinterrogative markers clearly. We also adopt the theories of generative grammar toanalyze the syntactic structures of four types of interrogative sentences (yes-noquestions, A-not-A questions, disjunctive questions and wh-questions) throughcomparison and contrast, aiming at finding reasonable strategies to explain theirsyntactic features. With respect to the controversial“阿VP”, we attempt to prove itscategorization from the perspective of syntax and pragmatics. In regard to thesentence-final particle “口伐”, we analyze its origin and the syntactic representation of“VP口伐”.