Syntactic Structure of Interrogative Sentences and Relative Clauses in English

Abstract:To make interrogative sentences and attributive sentences easier to teach and learn.The author tries to pin down how exactly interrogative sentences and relative sentences in English are formed by mainly looking into the grammatical rules of wh-movement so that English learners learn better in an more effective way.

Key words: interrogative sentences relative clauses wh-movementgrammatical rules

Introduction:

This paper researches on the rules of wh-movement in English which is a small branch of Chomsky’s transformational generative grammar in order to make interrogative sentences and relative sentences easier to teach and learn.

1.Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (UG)

Chomsky’s Universal Grammar defined in this way: “the system of principles， conditions， and rules that are elements or properties of all human language…the essence of human language.” (Chomsky，1957) Language is the system of communication in speech and writing that is used by people of a particular country， all human language have words for names of objects and events， in English we call them nouns.

For example a typical transformation in TG is the operation of subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI). This rule takes as its input a declarative sentence with an auxiliary: \"John has eaten all the tomatoes.\" and transforms it into \"Has John eaten all the tomatoes?” In their original formulation， these rules were stated as rules that held over strings of either terminals or constituent symbols or both.

E.g. X NP AUX Y → X AUX NP Y (NP = Noun Phrase and AUX = Auxiliary)

2.Wh-movement

“The name wh-movement comes from analyses in Generative Grammar where a wh-word begins at some other place in a sentence and moves to the front according to principle and parameter theory.” (N. Chomsky and H. Lasnik， 1993).

2.1 Wh-movement in interrogative sentences

What is a grammatically correct interrogative sentence? To answer this question， we need to introduce another concept: echo question which is a repetition of the first speaker’s sentence with a question mark and a rising tone at the end of the sentence as mentioned before. For example:

A: I studied English.

B: You studied what?

Here speaker B is echoing a statement made by speaker A.Grammatically we move the wh word to the left most of a interrogative sentence. Since an interrogative sentence must have an auxiliary which usually bears the tense of the sentence. So speaker B can ask like this: What did you study? Here the wh word was moved to the head of this sentence followed by a past tense auxiliary. Let us see some other examples:

B: What had happened in his office yesterday?

A: He had been scolded by his boss in his office yesterday.

B: Where had he been scolded by his boss?

A: He had been scolded by his boss in his office yesterday.

2.2 Wh-movement in indirect questions

Sometimes we need to describe others’ questions or questions of our own to others， that is to say indirect questions. This type of questions is actually statement， because there are not any question marks at the end of these sentences and the question are independent sentences inside the statement.Let us see more such examples:

I asked her which one is her handbag.

They asked me where I lived.

2.3 Wh-movement in relative clause

The appositive relative sentences are so called because sometimes we do not have to say the clause in the sentence but the meaning of it is not affected. For example: Tim – whom I met in university – is my best friend. However， this kind of modifier can not be put at the end of the sentence as restrictive relative clauses do.

In early transformational approaches to syntax， the analysis of wh-movement involved two syntactic levels——deep structure and surface structure. Let us see some example again:

(a) ——the book [which I read—]

(b) ——the girl [whom I met—]

(c) ——the room [where he stayed—]

In each case， the surface structure of these wh-relatives is quite clear: “which” substitutes for subject or object name or pronoun for animals and things as in case (a); “whom” substitutes for object name or pronoun for people as in case (b); “where” substitutes for subject or object name pronoun for places and positions as in case (c) etc.

3.Conclusion

Wh-movement is a branch theory of transformations， there are other movements like wh-movement such as V movement， I movement， NP movement and extra position (Andrew Ranford， 2000). This paper focuses only on wh-movement.Wh-word plays an important role in English grammar， they are indispensable constitutions in English interrogative sentences and relative clauses. This paper has a brief introduction of wh-movement in English， tries to make English learners understand the language easier.

Bibliography:

[1]Chomsky Syntactic Structure [M]．London：Mouton and Company 1957．

[2]Andrew Ranford．Chomsky’s Universal Grammar： An Introduction[M]．北京：Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press 2000．