An Investigation Into The Non-interrogative Usage Of Chinese Interrogative Words From A Set Concept Perspective

Interrogative and non-interrogative usages parallel in human language performance in a very complicated manner. As language progresses, its expressions are being enriched, among which, one is exemplified by the non-interrogative usage of interrogative words.This paper, based on the theories of cognitive linguistics and by employing the set concept, re-investigated the reference phenomena of interrogative pronouns, which we hope could semantically give a general explanation of the non-interrogative usage of interrogative words.First, the mathematical set concept is employed to reclassify the reference phenomena of the interrogative words. The logical relationship between the question and the answer is formulated in terms of how the speaker thinks of the question and to what extent he/she knows the question, based on which, a hypothetical S-Framework about the usage of interrogative words is proposed.Moreover, this research is founded on a large-scale database. Starting from authentic data, we examined five Chinese interrogative words, viz. shui, shenme, na, zenme and duoshao. We try to account for the interrogative usage of these five words by using the S-Framework and meanwhile a statistical analysis was given to the amount of their interrogative usage and their non-interrogative counterpart. And within the non-interrogative usage, the number of different categories was counted, which we believe may provide some insight into the re-understanding of the non-interrogative usage of interrogative words, at least it could contribute to the teaching of the phenomena as a second language.In addition, since the initial motive of this research is to explore the relationship between the interrogative usage and non-interrogative usage of the interrogative words, we proposes an assumption within the S-Framework, that is, the two usages of the interrogative words function in parallel and so dose the different categories within the non-interrogative usage. In other words, the non-interrogative usage is not derived from its interrogative equivalent, but due to fact that interrogative words per se have the characteristic of expressing non-interrogative mood. The initial vacuum of their non-interrogative form is caused by the original circumstances.