Universality is one of the important purposes in linguistic research, in order to find it out, we should use actual language phenomenon as medium or foundation. Therefore the research target in this paper is multiple wh-questions in English and Chinese, through the OT analysis, both English and Chinese multiple wh-questions can be explained by the constraints hierarchy: English: SO-OP-SPEC>>OB-HD>>HIE-ADJ>>FULL-INT>>STAY Chinese: STAY>>FULL-INT>>HIE-ADJ>>OB-HD=SO-OP-SPEC Meanwhile, the relations between two langauges also can be showed through constraints hierarchy. The biggest difference between them can be showed by the converse sequnce of constraints, which means English is a kind of structure-overt language and Chinese is meaning-overt language. But it doesn’t mean they are totally opposite with each other, from other constraint HIE-ADJ, it showed English and Chinese are sharing exactly the same word order. So through the multiple wh-questions analysis, the similarities and differences between English and Chinese has been showed clearly.
Ⅰ. Introduction
Ⅱ. Constraints Generation & Constraints Ranking
Ⅲ. OT Evaluation
Ⅳ. Comparison and Conclusion
Works Cited