A Contrastive Study Of Negation In English And Chinese From A Pragmatic Perspective

Negation is important as well as frequent in everyday social interactions all over the world. Cross-cultural communication may break down due to the speaker's misunderstanding and inappropriate application of negation in the target language. Negation in Chinese is much different from that in English. This author has read large quantities of documents about negation in English and Chinese and cited some sentences as the examples and investigated many Chinese native speakers and English native speakers (mainly teachers and students) in order to find out the application of negation in English and Chinese. This dissertation makes a contrastive study of negation in English and Chinese from a pragmatic perspective, the purpose of which is to further the study of negation in English and Chinese to improve the foreign language teaching and to improve the communication between people with different languages and cultures. To address that topic, a comparative approach is employed as general framework for the research work.To start with, this dissertation makes a contrastive study of negation in English and Chinese in terms of forms and pragmatic situations. There are negative morphemes, negative words and negative sentences in both languages, However, there are many more negative morphemes, words and structures in English than in Chinese. In Chinese there is no specialized negative morphemes. And even in the same situation, to the same event, the English-speaking people and the Chinese people may differ in making an utterance affirmatively or negatively.After a comparison of the forms and the pragmatic use of negation in English and Chinese, the dissertation explores cultural influences on the structure and use of negation in English and Chinese. Affected by the seashore commercial culture, the English-speaking people are good at abstract thinking and tend to adopt complexstructures to express themselves. English is hypotactic. Whereas the Chinese people, affected by the inland cultivation culture, are apt at thinking in terms of image. Chinese is paratactic. Therefore, the Chinese people find negation in English fuzzy and complicated. And due to different cultural backgrounds, the English-speaking people stress individualism, and tend to be self-assertive and direct. They will use the negative way to express the negative opinion. Whereas the Chinese, stress collectivism and place a high value on interpersonal harmony, especially the canon of and . Thus, they tend to be covert and indirect in making an utterance. When refusing the other, they do not make a negative utterance directly. But in some circumstances, even when they agree with the other, they are used to making a negative utterance. They will use the "self-depreciating" negative way to show modesty. And due to cultural difference, the English-speaking people tend to adopt a soft and affirmative way while the Chinese people tend to adopt a harsh and negative way in advertisements such as warning messages.Then the dissertation discusses the differences in semantic representation of negation in English and Chinese, which are mainly embodied in transferred negation, implied negation, covert affirmation, double negation, repeated negation, continuative negation, and sentences with Any/Any- as subjects.And this dissertation makes an analysis of the pragmatic values of negation in English and Chinese in some typical situations, such as negation used in accepting a gift, accepting a compliment, making a speech, and refusing a request, etc. In the research work, pragmatic theories are reviewed, of which Grice's Cooperative Principle(CP), Leech's Politeness Principle and Gu Yueguo's Chinese Politeness Theory(CPT) are chosen to explain the verbal behavior of the speakers. In the typical situations, the English-speaking people mainly observe the Quality Maxim of the CP and the Approbation Maxim and the Agreement Maxim of the PP, making affirmative utterances; the Chinese people mainly observe the Modesty Maxim of the PP and the Modesty and the Self-deprec...