A Comparative Study Of Rhetorical Questions In Chinese And Korean

"Rhetorical question" in Chinese is one of the sentence patterns with special functions in daily conversation.Especially the "rhetorical wh-question" composed of interrogative pronouns is more significant as a type of rhetorical questions.Any speaker can use this rhetorical question to emphatically express his or her special feelings and opinions.There are also "rhetorical questions" in Korean.Rhetorical questions containing interrogative words are also classified as a type of "rhetorical questions".Although rhetorical questions in Chinese and Korean are used in nearly the same number and frequency in daily communication,their syntactic composition and pragmatic situation are quite different.In this paper,the syntax,pragmatics and semantics of rhetorical questions in Chinese and Korean are studied based on the comparison of rhetorical questions composed of the interrogative pronouns " what"," how"," why"," where" and " who"in Chinese and those composed of interrogative pronouns "(?)","(?)","(?)","(?)","(?)" in Korean on the basis of the corpus collected from the two TV plays in both Chinese and Korean broadcasted after 2010 in order to understand the similarities and differences of rhetorical questions embodied in the two languages.Finally,this paper put forward the suggestions on the teaching of wh-questions to Korean trainees based on the questionnaires on their learning of wh-questions to correct their mistakes in understanding and application of wh-questions.Through the research in this paper,I hope to help Korean trainees learn rhetorical questions in Chinese,thus solving the difficulties in communication with native speakers.