A Pragmatic Approach To Negative Focus-sensitive Operator "Not"

Focus is a term linguists use to describe a sort of prominence in a sentence,usually marked by stress and particular sentence structures. It is an importantphenomenon in natural language, which has a deep interest among many linguists,functional and formal, including those who work in different fields, such as phonetic,syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and other interdisciplinary aspects. As a result, there haveemerged a lot of arguments on focus as well as various viewpoints. On the basis of anobservation on the studies of the focus over the past decades, this paper chooses thenegative focus as the topic and tries to clarify the relationship between the focus and thenegative-sensitive operator.Before the analysis of negative focus-sensitive operator “not”, this paper gives anoverall overview of the definition of focus, the classification of the focus andsummarizes the development on focus abroad and at home. Based on some relatedtheories, a brand-new model of analysing negative focus-sensitive operator on themacro-pragmatic level called focus model is proposed. This is also the main part wherethis paper lies on. What is more, at the end of this paper, a pragmatic hierarchy ofnegative focus-sensitive operator “not” is also given.Theoretically, this thesis will demonstrate the application of focus model indynamic communication. However, this new model still needs continuous supplements,enrichments and even modifications. Practically, this study will present a systematicalexplanation for the phenomena of focus especially in the dynamic context. Moreover,this study will also be an illustration for the people to understand the key point whenthey are taking part in a dynamic context.