A Comparative Study of Chinese and Bengali Interrogative Sentences

Abstract

This paper conducts a comparative analysis of the interrogative sentence structure in the Chinese language and the Bengali language which are the Sino-Tibetan and the Indo-European language families respectively. The paper focuses on syntactic, morphological, and pragmatic properties of the three major types of interrogatives, namely yes-no questions, WH-questions, and alternative questions. It is found that Chinese interrogatives are predominantly constructed using sentence final particles (e.g., ma), A-not-A structures, and in-situ WH-words. Bengali, by contrast, often puts the elements of interrogation in the sentence initial position and is a morphologically rich, inflexible system. Genetically, the two languages are unrelated, but both languages use systematic and rule-based methods of forming questions. Significant variation is observed in the distribution of WH-elements, the distribution of sentence final particles in the Chinese language, and the extent of verbal inflexion in the Bengali language. There are also pragmatic differences that can be observed, especially in politeness strategies and social relations encoding. The paper has shown that, irrespective of the structural divergence, both of the languages overlap in the communicative purpose of seeking information functionally. The results offer some useful theoretical insights and pedagogical recommendations to contrastive linguistics and second language learning.

Mother Language, 2026; 10(1): 77-100