A Study Of FVP Questions In The Anji Dialect

An FVP question is a type of question which is formed by adding an interrogative adverb(F)before the predicative component(VP)of a declarative sentence.It is an important question type in Chinese dialects.Linguists have done considerable research on FVP questions since more than thirty years ago.However,no research has been done on FVP questions in the Anji dialect in Zhejiang Province.In addition,only a few linguists study this question type from the perspective of formal syntax.Therefore,this research will describe and analyze FVP questions in the Anji dialect under the framework of the Minimalist Program and discuss the syntactic nature of this question type,aiming to enrich the study of FVP questions and that of Chinese formal syntax.First,this thesis describes the syntactic properties of FVP questions in the Anji dialect and proposes the following viewpoints: the interrogative adverb F in the FVP question is realized as hah in the Anji dialect;an adverbial can either precede or follow hah depending on the syntactic nature of the adverbial;in Mandarin Chinese,the interrogative form of the V-de construction is often ambiguous,but in the Anji dialect,hah can indicate the contrastive focus of the sentence and thus remove the ambiguity.Then,this thesis makes a syntactic analysis under the framework of the Minimalist Program and proposes the following viewpoints: hah in the FVP question is an interrogative adverb with a [wh] feature;the matrix C in the FVP question has a weak [ufocus] feature,hah assigns a [focus] feature to its immediately following phrase,and this phrase needs to move to the matrix C position to check this feature.Finally,this thesis discusses the classification of the interrogative system of the Anji dialect and the syntactic nature of FVP questions and proposes the following viewpoints: the interrogative sentences in the Anji dialect can be divided into three types: content questions,alternative questions and FVP questions;FVP questions correspond to polar questions in Mandarin Chinese.