A Contrastive Study Of Negation In English And In Chinese

Negation and affirmation are totally opposite twin concepts. The idea of negation is part of linguistic universal for almost all the languages in the world, but languages differ in ways to accomplish negation. Complexity of forms in English to express negative meaning, disagreement between negative meaning and negative form, and difference of idiomatic expression and patterns between English and Chinese result in the difficulties in understanding, translation and use of negation in English.The paper, based on Contrastive Linguistics, translation studies, Lexicology and Syntactics, conducts a contrastive and comparative study of negation in English and in Chinese, and tries to find similarities and dissimilarities. This paper adopts a planar or two-dimensional approach: horizontally, the study resides at three levels of linguistic study, but mainly the lexical level and syntactic level; and vertically, objects under the study, at each level, fall into explicit negation (affirmative in form) and implicit negation (negative in form). The contrastive research is accompanied by a large number of examples and corresponding translations, aimed at illuminating the problem and highlighting common errors in the translating of negation in English.Chapter One introduces and analyzes the subject of the paper. It also sheds light on the framework and layout of the paper.Chapter Two reviews three fields closely connected with the study of this paper: Contrastive Linguistics, translation theories, and studies on negation.Chapter Three makes a general contrast of negation between English and Chinese, and summarizes 19 differences in specific. Then general strategies and means oftranslating are proposed.The contrastive research is fully conducted from Chapter Four to Chapter Six. Chapter Four studies negation in English and in Chinese at the lexical level, which can be further divided into three sublevels, namely, morpheme, word, and phrase. Chapter Five studies negative sentences, explicit negative form at the syntacticlevel. And the study covers the classification, syntactic feature, nonassertive/assertive items, scope/focus of negation, two important tendencies, and some common special negative sentences. Chapter Six focuses on the implied negative sentences in English. According 10 devices employed to achieve negation, implied negative sentences are divided into four categories, namely, implied negative sentences by grammatical devices, by semantic devices, by rhetorical devices, and by pragmatic devices.The contrastive study is aimed at improving knowledge of various linguistic phenomena expressing negative meaning in English, and decreasing adversities in studying negation in English. A large number of examples and corresponding sentences are offered together with presentation of means and issues of translating, in order that language learners could commit less errors and translate English structures negative in meaning into correct, smooth and fluent Chinese.