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

The concept of negation is linguistically universal for almost all the languages in the world, but languages differ in ways and degrees of complexity to realize the concept of negation. People in different cultures tend to use their culture-specific negations when confronting the same situations. Complexity and diversity in form are the main features of English where the incongruity of negative form and negative meaning exists. There are more negative morphemes, words and structures in English than in Chinese. However, there are no specialized corresponding negative morphemes in Chinese whose negative words and structures are comparatively simple. All those differences would constitute obstacles to the understanding and use of negation for the learners of a second language.This contrastive study of English and Chinese negation is conducted on the basis of Contrastive Linguistics, Lexicology and Syntactics, aiming to find out similarities and differences of negation in English and Chinese. Horizontally, English and Chinese negations in this paper fall into explicit form and implicit form on the incongruity of form and meaning. And vertically, the author starts the paper at the three levels of language, mainly the lexical level, the syntactic level and the pragmatic level. The analysis of rhetoric devices employed in implied negations in English and Chinese will deepen the understanding of the pragmatic aims which implied negation reaches.In this paper, Grice's Cooperative Principle, Leech's Politeness Principle and Gu Yueguo's Chinese Politeness Theory are chosen to explain speakers' verbal behaviors. In consideration of politeness, people in two cultures violate the maxims of CP and observe Leech's PP. While as far as the PP is concerned, English-speaking people mainly observe the Quality Maxim of the CP and the Approbation Maxim and the Agreement Maxim of...