Diachronic Typology Of Chinese Yes-No Questions

This is a special study of Chinese yes-no questions from the perspective of diachronic typology.Diachronic typology studies the evolution of language types and reveals the trend of language evolution,which is an important research field of linguistic typology.The dissertation investigates the main development process of the system of Chinese yes-no questions and type change of neutral question and attempts to make a reasonable and feasible explanation for some problems and disputes in the evolution of yes-no questions.The full text is divided into 6 chapters.Chapter 1 Introduction.Explain the scope and focus of this dissertation,define the yes-no question and the various types contained in it;briefly review and comment on the research of Chinese interrogative sentences by scholars and the main classification systems of interrogative sentences;theories and methods used,sources of corpus,etc.Chapter 2 The system of yes-no questions in modern Chinese.This chapter investigates the synchronic system of yes-no questions.Take Mandarin as an example.It mainly includes A-not-A questions,ma(?)questions,intonation questions,and alike questions(using final particles like a(?),ba(?),etc.).Among them,A-not-A questions and ma questions have neutral status;intonation questions and a-like questions are only used for leading questions.The question"shi-bu-shi(???)VP/NP"is a slightly special form of A-not-A questions.When shi-bu-shi loses the main focus position,the question often has confirmatory effect.Chapter 3 The Diachronic development and type change of pre-Qin Chinese yes-no questions.The system of pre-Qin Chinese yes-no questions has different characteristics from Chinese of later ages.A-not-A questions have not yet been substantively produced,and there is no independent syntactic status in the question system.As far as the current research is concerned,intonation questions may be the main type of yes-no questions in Shang and Western Zhou Dynasty.In the Spring and Autumn Period,there was an important typological change in the yes-no questions.Final question particle hu(?)emerged.During the Warring States period,hu was still a question particle mainly used for yes-no questions.This period produced three changes,showing the change and development of the Chinese yes-no question system.Chapter 4 Two grammaticalization cycles of Chinese yes-no questions since ancient times.Since ancient times,Chinese yes-no questions have experienced two grammatical cycles.The hu question probably originated in the late Spring and Autumn Period and continued to be popular in the Han Dynasty.At the later stage of the Eastern Han Dynasty,it was fading due to the erosion of syllable and semantics.With the decay of the hu question,"VP-neg" as a type of A-not-A questions gradually replaced the final particle type and thus went into the next grammaticalization cycle."VP not"(not = fou?/bu ?)was formed in the Western Han Dynasty and was widely used in the late Eastern Han Dynasty.During the Wei and Jin Dynasties,"VP fou/bu" showed signs of grammaticalization.From the phonetic point of view,the consonant of the negative word fou at the end of the sentence first became voiced as po(?),and then becomes nasal as wu(?).Since the end of the Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties,the characters mo(?),mo(?),mo(?/?),ma(?)were used to mark it in succession.From the syntactic and semantic point of view,the intervention of negative adverbs is an important part during the grammaticalization of "VP fou" questions.The ma question which was the further grammaticalization of it,finally turned to be rhetorical and marginal,thus essentially the became leading questions.The re-enhancement of neutral question function of the ma question in Mandarin is influenced by vernacular novels in modern times,and it is a case of the influence of Chinese written language on spoken language.Chapter 5 Diachronic layers of three main types of A-not-A questions and internal relations between them.Omit the deletion is difficult to explain the origin and development of various A-not-A questions.The omission factor may only play a certain role in the normalizing of the "VP not V" type.The earliest mature A-not-A questions in Chinese is the "VP not" type,in which the negative word has the property of predicate and referentiality.The "VP not V(P)" type appeared no earlier than the late Eastern Han Dynasty,and the maturity time was not earlier than Tang.The motivation for the rise of this type is the erosion of the older "VP not" type;the formation mechanism is the syntactic update of the negative component: the negative word "not"(fou/bu)was updated by "not V(P)".The syntactic feature of the "V not VP" type is quite different from the older "VP not" type.It was not formed until very late under new conditions.The development of language itself and the diffusion of vocabulary may be internal factors for its development,but the true formation of this type is more likely in the contact of slower developing "VP not" dialects and the mighty "VP not V(P)" dialects.It is the product of analogy and reconciliation in the process of grammatical replication.The replica language is the "VP not" dialect and the model language is the "VP not V(P)" dialect.The simple and unified advantages of the syntactic structure of the "V not VP" type help it to penetrate and expand outward after formation.From the perspective of typology,the typical "Particle-VP" question in Chinese dialects does not belong to the A-not-A question,but a type of yes-no questions using question particle in second position in sentence.Both "PRT-VP" questions and A-not-A questions belong to yes-no questions and can be used as neutral question.Chapter 6 Conclusion.Integrate the research of each chapter and summarize the main conclusions drawn from the full text.Point out the innovations and deficiencies of this dissertation,in order to make some efforts and improvements in the future work.