Interrogative pronouns, just as the term suggests, are pronouns that express information of interrogations. They are the important means of transmitting enquiring information and the study of interrogative pronouns is now playing a decisive role in the linguistic field. Scholars at home and abroad all have done tremendous descriptions, explanations and researches in this field. Most domestic linguists lay more emphasis on the description and classification of linguistic phenomena. Detailed as the classifications are, “they haven't reached a consensus on a united opinion; on the contrary, western scholars usually pay more attention to the formulation of the theoretical structure in the hope that it may be suitable for all languages. Their formulae are well-knit, but the disadvantage is obvious”.
Each language family, its branch or even each language has its individual grammatical mechanism. If we apply the same structure to all languages mechanically and leave all exceptions aside, then it is hard to avoid mistakes. Combining the domestic and international achievements, we try to make descriptions and explanations to English and Uzbek interrogative pronouns, especially who and, ‘kim’ using the general theories of contrastive linguistics and cognitive linguistics. Then the reasons and trends of their development are expounded on the basis of grammaticalization. Contrasting their similarities and differences, the thesis tries to achieve the combination of phenomenon description and theory explanation. Kim and who both enjoy the high rate of usages. In Uzbek, ‘kim’ is defined as an indefinite personal interrogative pronoun, and the English who is in the same word category and has similar usages. Therefore, from the perspective of contrastive linguistics, who and ‘kim’ satisfy the essential basis of comparison. The thesis makes a comparative analysis to ‘kim’ and who from two aspects: interrogative usages and non-interrogative usages. Through plenty of linguistic examples, we find that they share similar interrogative usages, but differ in their non-interrogative usages due to different syntactic restrictions. What's more, because of the same cognitive model shared by human beings, ‘kim’ and who have gone through similar developing paths in their usages. That is, interrogative usages are their basic usages, and non-interrogative usages like arbitrary reference and subjunctive reference are extended through the progress of grammaticalization. This process is a process in which objective meanings gradually reduce, subjunctive meanings increase and interrogative signs disintegrate. In this process, interrogative pronouns come through usages in certain highly restrained local contexts to be reanalyzed as having non-interrogative usages or pragmatic functions. Making a relatively comprehensive comparison of interrogative and non-interrogative usages between ‘kim’ and who, this thesis gives a full analysis to their similarities and differences in usages. Moreover, it reveals the deeper reasons of their usages change, which gets to the height of human cognition. It also provides the interrogative word study and contrastive linguistics with a new perspective, offers new materials for relevant studies, and achieves the combination of phenomenon description and theoretical study…
Pronouns are a relatively small, closed class of words that function in the place of nouns or noun phrases. They include personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, relative pronouns, interrogative pronouns, and some others, mainly indefinite pronouns.
The interrogative pronouns are who, what, which, and all of them can take the suffix -ever for emphasis. The pronoun who refers to a person or people; it has an oblique form whom though in informal contexts this is usually replaced by who, and a possessive form the pronoun or determiner whose. The pronoun what refers to things or abstracts. The word which is used to ask about alternatives from what is seen as a closed set: which (of the books) do you like best? (It can also be an interrogative determiner: which book?; this can form the alternative pronominal expressions which one and which ones.) Which, who, and what can be either singular or plural, although who and what often take a singular verb regardless of any supposed number.
We consider that language learners should keep in mind the above 10 interrogative pronouns are frequently seen as relative pronouns (pronouns that link phrases and clauses together) as well. The difference is that while it’s possible to find a relative pronoun used in a question, interrogative pronouns only appear in a question. Here are more sentence examples of Interrogative Pronouns. In the following sentences the interrogative pronoun is underlined.
What are you talking about?
Who is the villain here?
Which color did you choose for your bedroom wall?
Whose camera is this?
Once we learn to speak French, whom are you going to talk to?
As it is said above, all the interrogative pronouns can also be used as relative pronouns. We’ll see this below for more details.
There are five main interrogative pronouns in English: who, whom, whose, what and which. Who, whose and whom are interrogative pronouns that ask for names of persons. We use who when the answer is the subject of the verb.
Examples: Who broke the cup? Paul broke the cup.
Who sang the loudest? She sang the loudest.
Whom — we use whom when the answer is the object of the verb.
Examples: Whom is she talking to? She is talking to Philip.
Whom did you see? I saw Peter.
Although whom is the correct form for the object of the verb, it is rarely used in normal spoken English. Usually who is used instead of whom.
Whose — we use whose when we want to ask about ownership.
Examples: Whose is this house? Whose car did you drive here?
What — what is an interrogative pronoun that asks for names of things.
Examples: What is the time? What is your cat’s name?
Which — which is an interrogative pronoun that asks for a specific person or thing from a group.
Examples: Which of these bags is yours? Which of them is the shortest?
As to their structure English and Uzbek interrogative pronouns are almost the same:
‘Who’- ‘kim’ –they are the same.
‘Whom’ is an object form of the ‘who’. A little difference here is in the Uzbek language ‘whom’ has 4 forms. They are: kimni, kimga, kimda, kimdan.
‘whose’- ‘kimning’- there is no difference between them. Because they are in a genitive case.
‘What’- ‘nima’ –they are the same as to their structure in both languages.
‘which’- ‘qaysi’- they are the same as to their structural types.
About the semantic types of the interrogative pronouns, they are the same in the compared languages. For example, the word which asks the subject of the action is ‘who’. In the Uzbek language, ‘kim’ is used for asking subject of the sentence.
Who left the door opened? — kim eshikni ochiq qoldirdi?
‘Whom’ gives the same meaning as kimni, kimda, kimga, kimdan.
Whom do you like the most? –kimni eng ko’p yoqtirasiz?
‘Whose’ also the same as to their semantic:
Whose car is that? — bu kimning mashinasi?
‘which’ is also similar to ‘qaysi’:
Which is your friend? — qaysi biri sizning do’stingiz?
So, they are similar to each other as to their semantic features.
References:
- Азизов А. А. Сопоставительная грамматика русского и узбекского языков. Морфология — Ташкент: Фан. 1999
- Ilyish B. A. The Structure of Modern English, Leningrad, 1965, 118- 130;
- Беляева М. А. Грамматика английского языка. — Москва. 1963
- Боровков А.К, Маъруфов З. Ўзбек тили грамматикаси. 1қисм Тошкент. 1981
- Бўронов Ж. Б. Инглиз ва ўзбек тиллари қиёсий грамматикаси. Тошкент. 1993
