A Comparative Study on English & Chinese Wh-Questions in the Optimality Theory

A Comparative Study on English & Chinese Wh-Questions in the Optimality Theory

This paper is aimed to find some differences between English and Chinese under simple wh-question. In order to deal with it, I should find some good theories to let this comparison become as easy as possible. So first I take some classical theories to explain the simple wh-question between English and Chinese, but it seems very complex to express these two languages under these theories, also it's hard to figure out the essential difference between these two languages. So I choose another theory- Optimality Theory(abbreviated to OT) to explain this phenomenon. The main principle of OT is all of the principles and rules (in OT we called constraints) can be violated by the candidates, and based on the characteristics of language, these constraints should be ranked upon their importance for the target language. So the higher ranked one has bigger power than the one located lower. Even these constraints can be violated, violation should be minimum. So among all of the candidates, the one who violates the less higher ranked constraints and the violation is smallest can be chosen as the best optimal candidates. Because of the flexible of OT, it can easy adapt to a lot of languages. In this paper, OT is used to analyze English and Chinese simple wh-question, after the data analysis, four constraints are generated to restrict ungrammatical sentences. The purpose of this paper is doing comparison, so we'd better use the same constraints with different ranking hierarchy. Finally, constraints hierarchy for both two languages have been done. English is OP-SPEC>>OB-HD>>FULL-INT>>STAY; and Chinese is STAY>>FULL-INT>>OB-HD>>OP-SPEC. From the ranking we can see the most important constraint of these two languages is just opposite with each other. So I conclude they are just belong to different language family, English need move but Chinese should stay; also the second important constraint also opposite, it shows in English it allows a part of auxiliarly words but in Chinese non of them is needed, Through all of the analysis that has done until now, it's can express that English pays much attention on its sentence form, but Chinese focus much on its sentence meaning. Through this simple four constraints and their ranking, the problem just been explained clearly.