| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 語言研究所 === 89 === Abstract
The present thesis aims to explore the relationship between form and function by investigating four types of yes-no questions, namely A-not-A questions, Particle questions, Tag questions and Declarative questions, in Mandarin Chinese.
A scale is found in terms of the speaker’s certainty concerning the proposition being questioned about by examining real-life conversations. The speaker’s certainty is shown from low to high in an ascending order going from A-not-A questions, to Particle questions, to Tag questions and finally to Declarative questions. This scale is further supported by the result of a questionnaire survey designed to collect native speakers’ responses toward the four question types in different contexts.
Along with evidence from the sentence types involved and the distance between the interrogative device and the proposition, the interrogative force of the question types is shown in the reverse order of the speaker’s certainty scale. The question forms in terms of the distance between the interrogative device and the proposition can be integrated to the Proximity Principle, which states that the closer two linguistic entities are in meaning, the more they will exhibit temporal/ spatial proximity at the code level.
In pragmatic terms, when a speaker chooses the question type which carries higher interrogative force, he intends to show lower certainty concerning the assumption. This constant correlation between form and function of yes-no questions in Mandarin Chinese gives support to the view that the relationship between linguistic form and function is not arbitrary.
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