On The Categories Of Double Negation In Chinese And English

As a common and complex language phenomenon, double negation has attracted attention of scholars at home and abroad. Scholars have made studies on the structure, semantic relation, the conditions to convey affirmative meaning, etc. But up to now, there is no consensus among scholars on many issues. Therefore, based on conversational implicature theories, we carry out profound and systematic research on the categories of double negation in Chinese and English by means of formal analysis. We aim to find out the similarities and differences of these languages from the description of syntactic and semantic features, and thus, deepening our understanding of this phenomenon.The whole dissertation consists of eight chapters.The first chapter is a general introduction, which presents the reason for the choice of the topic, research methodology and sources of Chinese and English corpus, with the main focus on the objects of and theoretical foundations for the study.The second chapter is concerned with the definition of double negation. We review the scholars'studies on the definition, scope and criteria of classification of English and Chinese double negation, and points out their contributions and shortcomings and manage to give our own definition. The relationship between double negative and affirmation meaning is formulated in terms of contrary, contradictory semantic relation and Horn scale. Finally, some structures easily confused with double negation are analyzed.Chapter Three discusses the categories of double negation. Based on Levinson's Three Levels of Meaning, pragmatic factors, and idiomatice patterns are included in the categorization, Double negation in Chinese and English are classified into semantic and pragmatic double negation with two subcategories, thus changing the research focus from static to dynamic analysis. Meanwhile, the concept of degree of context relevance is put forward to illustrate the distance between double negation categories and context.Chapter Four presents the category of semantic double negation and its syntactic representation. Semantic double negation is related to literal or logical meaning of negative markers and is classified into explicit and implicit double negation according to the explicitness of two negative markers. The explicit double negation is further divided based on whether we can directly find the prototype of double negation,"(?)((?)p)" or "(?)p", in the logic form of the construction; meanwhile the negative meaning is canceled. The implicit double negation is primarily described in term of implicit negative word or implicit negative structure. With Chinese and English corpus, we make logical analysis of explicit and implicit semantic double negation and their subcategories and investigate their syntactic features and licensing conditions.Chapter Five analyzes the category of pragmatic double negation and its syntactic representation. It relies on pragmatic negation means or context to identify. The two subcategories, type and token pragmatic double negation, are named after utterance-type meaning and utterance-token meaning in Levinson's Three Level Meaning Theory. Type pragmatic double negation is divided into interrogative and imperative subcategories according to idiomatic syntactic patterns. Token pragmatic double negation reveals the negation of negation in combination of explicit or implicit negatives and negative markers in context. This chapter reveals the syntactic representation of subcategories of pragmatic double negation and probes into the way the affirmative meanings are derived.Chapter Six explains semantic association and location of double negation categories. Double negation categories are connected with features of conversational implicature and disambiguation. According to Markedness Theory, they have different degrees of markedness, with their markedness degree increasing in the order of semantic double negation, type pragmatic double negation and token pragmatic double negation.Chapter Seven explores the pragmatic function and motivation of double negation. First of all, we introduce the pragmatic function of understatement and emphasis. Then, M-principle, Q-principle in Levinson's Three Principles, politeness strategy and echoic use are applied to explore people's motivation in using double negation structure.The last chapter is the summary of the work done and subconclusions we have made. Furthermore, research values, originality are discussed in addition to some suggestions for further study on the topic under investigation.