A Stady Of Negation In English And Chinese

Horn's (1989) A Natural History of Negation opens with the following statements:"All human systems of communication contain a representation of negation. No animal communication system includes negative utterances, and consequently, none possesses a means for assigning truth value, for lying, for irony, or for coping with false or contradictory statements."So the main aim of this paper is to provide an account of the patterns of negation found in natural language. The expression and interpretation of negation in natural language have done fascinated philosophers, logicians, and linguists. In the common language phenomenon, the forms and functions of the negation are not so easy or transparent. Especially from the logical perspective, the complete correspondence of the affirmative and the negative is not impossible in use of the linguistic structure and language. The fact that all human languages establish a distinction between affirmative and negative statements is the starting point of my investigation. Accordingly, background notions on negation in logic and language are interpreted and a range of linguistic issues about negation at the lexical, syntax and semantics interface are discussed in this thesis. So the base of investigation is the distinction between English negation and Chinese negation. Cross-linguistic variation is the major topic, in both synchronic and diachronic perspectives at the same time, apply for two dimensional approaches to demark two parts: explicit negation and implicit negation. Besides the paper adopt contrastive language knowledge to deeply dig similarity and difference between English negation and Chinese Negation from three aspects: lexis, syntax and semantics. The aim of this paper is to analyze the form and meaning of negation from different perspectives and then put forward some means or strategies to determine the truth value of negation. In this way, we can better finish the converting between English and Chinese for the purpose of improving the level of using language. So the base of investigation is the distinction between English negation and Chinese negation. Cross-linguistic variation is a major topic, in both synchronic and diachronic perspectives at the same time, apply for two dimensional approaches to demark two parts: explicit negation and implicit negation. Besides the paper adopt contrastive language knowledge to deeply dig similarity and difference between English negation and Chinese Negation from three aspects: lexis, syntax and semantics.At the lexis, the writer makes use of two-dimensional approach to divide into two parts: explicit negation and implicit negation in order to study form and meaning of negation. In the scope of explicit negation, prefixes and suffixes will be analyzed in English and prefixes and infixes will be studied in Chinese. Although there aren't special negative affixes, the function of general affixes in Chinese are similar to that of affixes in English. Besides studying negative affixes using contrastive linguistic theory, because the number of negation form and words in English is more than that of Chinese, the writer studies and discusses the words including"not"and"不/bu","no"and"没有/meiyou".At the syntax, the paper mainly divided negation into implicit negation and explicit negation with contrastive linguistic knowledge. Separately discuss predicate negation and non-predicate negation, partial negation and complete negation, transferred negation and double negation in the explicit negation at the same time study exclamatory and imperative sentences expressing negative emotion, rhetorical expression used for negation, emphasized sentences used for negation, conditional sentences used for negation and subjunctive expression used for negation. This chapter uses a great many examples to distinguish the forms of syntax in order to search for efficient rules to realize the correspondent conversion of English-Chinese sentences.At the semantics, the writer mainly studies negation scope and negation focus. If a sentence with meaning have negative words or negators, while we cannot determine the negation scope and negation focus, the result is that it will produce ambiguity even misunderstanding. So in this chapter, the writer invent four categories to determine negation focus and four categories to determine negation scope, furthermore to realize the purpose that English learners exactly know about the true meaning the speakers express.The paper uses all kinds of theories from lexis, syntax and semantics in many perspectives and levels to study negation in both English and Chinese, in order to detect the difference of expressing the negative forms and meanings in these two languages. In this way, we will get a comprehensive and systematic understanding of this linguistic phenomenon, while the previous study on the level of pragmatics can not lead a thorough apprehension of this linguistic phenomenon's essence and the shortcomings of oneness, unilateralism and looseness are exposed. This paper will contribute the pure theoretical study to negation so as to develop a new way for the posterity.