A Contrastive Analysis Of Chinese "na Ge" And English "Which"

Interrogative pronouns, as the word implies, are pronouns which both can express things and refer to interrogative meanings. Meanwhile, interrogative pronouns are the main method to express interrogative information in special questions and play an important role in the evolution of relative pronouns, indefinite pronouns and interjections. Interrogation has long been the major concern of many scholars. In recent years, more and more researchers have devoted to the contrastive studies in interrogation and many of them have made great achievements.Domestic scholars emphasize the description and classification and ignore the explanation and analysis.In addition, the research lacks a macro theory, so it is difficult to form a unified conclusion.On the contrary, scholars abroad pay more attention to the formulation of theoretical frame in order to discover the similarities among different languages. However, the individuality of language predestines the study in this aspect and has some limitations.The above indicates that the contrastive study of interrogative pronouns is a significant object.Taking "na ge" in Chinese and "which" in English as the major objective of the study, this paper tries to combine the research achievements both in the country and abroad and applies the general discipline and method of contrastive linguistics and cognitive linguistics to the study. The author aims to find out the similarities and differences of Chinese-English interrogative pronouns and at the same time to explain their interrogative usages and non-interrogative usages.A great number of researches indicate that the interrogative usages of interrogative pronouns "na ge" in Chinese and "which" in English share the most similarities. They are of similar word class and grammatical form. But their non-interrogative usages differ because of syntactic constraints. In spite of this, due to the same underlying cognitive pattern, "na ge" and "which" undergo similar evolvement. The interrogative usages evolve into non-interrogative usage gradually, such as arbitrary reference and subjunctive reference. The evolvement of interrogative pronouns from interrogative usages to non-interrogative usages in some specific context is not only a process of historical development but also a process of grammaticalization.This thesis made a relatively comprehensive analysis and study of the interrogative usages and non-interrogative usages of "na ge" in Chinese and "which" in English. The paper concludes that there are many similarities between the two languages and differences in their way of expressing non-interrogative meanings. Hopefully, the result of this thesis could provide new research materials for future study.