A Study On The Negative Sentence Of Modern Chinese

This paper investigates the negative sentence of modern Chinese synthetically. It aims at concluding the research about the negative sentence of modem Chinese, and clarifying the mistakes, and inaugurating a new direction. The author not only arrange material, but innovate. This paper advocates to distinguish negation from the negative sentence. To discriminate the negative sentence must rely on form mainly, and takes meaning into account, this paper analyses the negative words with history and dialect, and hackles the origin of the negative words of modem Chinese distinctly. This paper divides the negative sentence into the common negation and the pragmatic negation according to meaning and function - it compares one with another-and especially analyses the pragmatic negation. This paper divides the negative focus into the contrastive focus and the natural focus ,and investigates the distributing position of the negative words. This paper points out that there are two types asymmetry about the negative sentence: the asymmetry of affirmation compared with negation and the asymmetry of "bu" compared with "mei", and attempts to analyse the mechanism of the asymmetry. This paper dissertates the social use of the negative sentence of modem Chinese in the end. It interprets the ambiguity of negative sentence and the pragmatic effect in detail.