A contrastive study of questions in Mandarin and French : from theory to corpus analysis
(2026)
Files
Thesis_final_0504_Hung-Hsin.pdf
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 7.61 MB
Details
- Authors
- Supervisors
; Her, One-Soon- Abstract
- (en) The aim of this dissertation is to undertake a cross-linguistic examination of questions in Mandarin and French. By combining theoretical discussions with empirical corpus analyses, I endeavour to shed light on three key topics: question types, wh-in-situ, and question particles. The theoretical part initiates with a comprehensive overview of questions based on typology studies. Two primary issues are addressed: the classification of question types (i.e., polar questions, constituent questions, and disjunctive questions) and the marking strategies of questions (e.g., intonation, word order, tags, particles, question words). Following the overview in typology, the focus narrows to the two languages under investigation, Mandarin and French. In addition to presenting their question types and marking strategies, considerable attention is given to the distinction of question types, particularly the debated status of disjunctive questions. Utilizing empirical data gathered from the grammaticality judgement tasks in both languages, I explore the plausibility of different theoretical question taxonomies. Subsequently, attention shifts to two linguistic phenomena attested in both Mandarin and French. Wh-in-situ, a default position of question words in Mandarin, is optional in French. Despite this difference, two syntactic accounts for wh-in-situ (e.g., LF movements and unselective binding) is applicable in both languages. However, when applying these mechanisms, the effect of syntactic constraints might be imposed differently between the two languages. Additionally, question particles are shared (e.g., Mandarin: 嗎 ma and 呢 ne; French: est-ce que and ça). Alongside an overview of these particles across different linguistic levels, with pertinent discussions in formal syntax, primary focus is placed on comparing the 呢 ne and the ça particle. Both particles allow occurrence with constituent questions and, pragmatically, are used for co-referencing to the preceding context. On the basis of theoretical overview and discussion, this study examines authentic language use through a self-compiled bidirectional parallel corpus, comprising six original novels in Mandarin and French, along with their respective translations. The texts are processed using Sketch Engine for automatic extraction, and subsequent coding of extracted data involves identifying question types and marking strategies. The coding facilitates following analyses. Analyses are conducted from three perspectives. First, the bilingual comparable approach investigates the distribution of question types and marking strategies across the two source languages. Second, the bidirectional parallel approach examines how cross-linguistic differences are reflected or accommodated in translations. Third, the monolingual comparable approach assesses the translation effect by comparing non-translated and translated languages within the same language. To further examine the data, a Bayesian regression model is applied to evaluate the influence of multiple variables, including register, language, translation status, and literary genre, on the distribution of questions and related syntactic phenomena. The concluding chapter integrates findings from both theoretical and empirical analyses, highlighting the contributions to contrastive linguistics, corpus linguistics and the theory of questions. It also discusses limitations, proposes directions for future research, and suggests practical applications for pertinent fields, such as language pedagogy, language learning, and translation studies.
- Affiliations
Citations
Hsu, H.-H. (2026). A contrastive study of questions in Mandarin and French : from theory to corpus analysis. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/275756