Abstract:

The academic circle has proposed four categories and eight patterns to interpret the relationship between the four basic sentence types, that is, declarative sentences, exclamatory sentences, interrogative sentences and imperative sentences. This paper suggests that the relationship pattern of “declarative sentences and exclamatory sentences vs. interrogative sentences and imperative sentences” is an interactive “weak- strong” one, providing supplementary arguments from the following three aspects: (1) a new examination of existing sentence type markers; (2) the intonation system and its division of work; (3) the co-occurrence between intonations and modal particles. It shows that Chinese sentence type markers generally form a mutually exclusive system of alternatives, in which each sentence marker can be assigned to a type, and no sentence marker is a member of more than one types. Therefore, the four sentence types of the two categories in the interactive “weak- strong” relationship pattern have their respective syntactic forms, which shows that this pattern can be regarded as the best relationship pattern of Chinese sentence types.

Key words: sentence type, sentence type markers, relationship pattern of sentence types, relationship pattern of “declarative sentences and exclamatory sentences vs. interrogative sentences and imperative sentences”