A Contrastive Study Of Negation Between English And Chinese

Negation is one of the most common linguistic phenomena in languages. Different languages differ in ways to accomplish and express negation. Negation has long drawn the attention of linguists who have made contributions. A Greek philosopher Aristotle is the earliest in studying negation, and Jespersen showed that English negation can be classified as nexal negation and special negation and he has done in-depth analysis in the English language. Chinese scholars have also analyzed the usage and forms of negation. But most of the studies aim at the analysis of one particular language rather than contrastive analysis between the two languages: English and Chinese. There are even less documents about contrastive negation between English and Chinese relevant to cultures. Therefore, I have read a large number of documents about English and Chinese negation and cited some sentences as the examples to show the negative similarities and especially the differences in the two languages. This thesis makes a contrastive study of negation in English and Chinese from different levels and tries to explore cultural differences and influences on negation, which help explore the study of negation in English and Chinese and draw learners' much attention not only to the languages themselves, but also to the cultures and to improve people's way of using language properly and correctly.The paper, based on contrastive linguistics, lexicology and syntactics, conducts a contrastive and comparative study of negation between English and Chinese. To start with, this dissertation makes an introduction to negation which includes the definition of negation in English and Chinese, classification of negation and its various levels. What follows are the previous research done by the other scholars and the whole arrangement of the test about the negation in English and Chinese. After a detailed introduction of negation, the thesis begins to explore negation between English and Chinese at the morphological level, lexical level and syntactic level.In the thesis, the lexical level is divided into morpheme, word and phrase. In English negative morphemes, which also called negative affixes, that has prefixes and suffixes. In Chinese there is no specialized negative affixes, but has some versatile first morphemes in compounds and even negative infixes which function more or less like the English affixes. It makes a contrast of negative affixes in English and Chinese. Since are many more negative words and negative forms in English than in Chinese. Then the author gives a contrastive study of negative words in the two languages. Especially, the contrastive studies of "not" and "不", "no" and "没有", "不"and "没...