Comparative Study On Non-interrogative Usage Of Chinese And Thai Interrogative Pronoun "Shenme" And "A-rai"

Chinese "shenme" and Thai "a-rai" are both the most basic andrepresentative interrogative pronouns in their own language system. Asother interrogative pronouns,"expressing doubt" is a basic usage for"shenme" and "a-rai", but besides this, they also have a variety ofnon-interrogative usages. Although many similarities exist innon-interrogative usages of "shenme" and "a-rai", there are also lots ofdifferences, especially in syntax, which bring some troubles to learners ofthe two languages. Therefore, there are certain practical significances tocomparatively study the non-interrogative usages of "shenme" and "a-rai".Under the guidance of correlation theories of comparative linguistics,syntactics and pragmatics, as well as combining with relevant researchresults on Chinese and Thai, this paper conducts synchronic comparativestudy on non-interrogative usages of "shenme" and "a-rai" respectivelyfrom the aspects of classification, syntax and pragmatics. Through aseries of comparative analysis, it is found that "shenme" and "a-rai" haveseven types of non-interrogative usages, in which "anaphoric usage" is aspecific non-interrogative usage of "shenme", while "special usage" is aspecific one of "a-rai". The rest six types of usages are common in both"shenme" and "a-rai", which are indefinite usage, non-referential usage,citing usage, borrowing reference usage, negative usage and exclusiveusage. In the syntactic structure, there are lots of difference between thetwo, which is specifically reflected in word order and collocation ofwords. In short, the word "shenme" has more sentence patterns innon-interrogative usages. In terms of pragmatics, both "shenme" and"a-rai" can be used in declarative, interrogative, and exclamatorysentences. However,"shenme" can also be used in the imperativesentence but "a-rai" cannot. What’s more, both "shenme" and "a-rai" can express "negative tone","tactful tone" and "surprised tone" in theirnon-interrogative usages. Finally combining with differences of syntacticstructure in non-interrogative usages of "shenme" and "a-rai", it discussesthe attentions need to be paid by Chinese and Thai students in learning"shenme" and "a-rai", and proposes some specific teaching suggestions.