A Study On Negation In Modern Chinese

A Study on Negation in Modern ChineseSemantic categories have begun to find its increasing importance in Chinese linguistics nowadays more than a century after the birth of this academic field. The focus on semantic categories can be seen throughout the numerous discussions on form vs. meaning and the "Three Plane Theory" in the early 1980s. With the development in functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics, in particular, study on semantic categories started to receive more attention. A decade later, a big turnabout among the Chinese linguists set a good ground for it to reach its status held at present. Under the circumstances, the study on negation naturally became one of the main concerns in current linguistics. Negation is believed to play a rather unique role in the study of linguistics, in a sense that if the problems of and related to negation are made lucid, other problems can be given better elucidation which will help to add a new dimension in Chinese linguistics as a whole. On the basis of present-day theories, this paper attempts to examine in depth negation in modern Chinese.The paper consists of five chapters and a conclusion, of which the first one points out the purpose of study of negation and the theoretical framework for the paper. It also explains the usage of the data used here. Chapter two reviews the study on negation in the past, and pinpoints the shortcomings and vacuums that can be delved into. Chapter three gives a detailed discussion on negation and analyzes the category on three planes, namely lexical plane (lexical negation), syntactic-semantic plane (semantic negation) and pragmatic plane (pragmatic negation). Through the division, we are able to deepen the understanding of the properties of negational category in Chinese. Chapter four mainly dwells on the study of subjective negation and objective negation on the semanticplane. "Negation" in subjective event and objective event are discussed separately. Subjective negation involves volition, motivation, personal judgement, appraisal and mental state or psychological state of a language user. A subjective-objective hierarchy is proposed, in terms of which the most inherent and basic semantic characteristics of "bu"(不) and "mei" (没) are clarifies. The collocation of 2,170 core verbs with "bu" and "mei" are also investigated and analyzed, and based on how negation is related to voice, the conclusion we draw above is further proved. Chapter five discusses static and dynamic negation. It proposes that "bu" be a static negational category, representing mainly "property" and focusing on "homogeneity", while "mei" is a dynamic negational category, representing "change in the process of time", and focusing on "heterogeneity". The paper concludes with a review of some, if any, of its new hypothesis and of the problems that are left unresolved which need to be further explored.