A Study On The Pragmatic Negation In Chinese Discourse

The negative phenomenon in daily life is abundant and interesting.The negative ways in language present diversity and complexity.Pragmatics pays much attention to the phenomena and rules in daily intercommunication and also negative phenomena.In this thesis,we study about the Chinese pragmatic negations using pragmatic theory. Chapter 2 looks back to the interrelated research results on "negations",analyzes and compares many terms.Chapter 3 is the emphasis of this thesis;we give a new definition to "pragmatic negation" and its classification.It finds that,all the former study of pragmatic negation was limited in a very narrow sense.People don't think that some negative phenomena,especially the one eliciting from literal words belongs to pragmatic negation.The word "pragmatic" means the use of language,and the entire negative phenomenon in real intercommunication belong to pragmatic negation."Pragmatic negation" can be divided into two kinds depending on whether the real meaning of the speaker is the same as the literal meaning.They are implicated negation and utterance negation.Implicated negation means non-literal negation,and it concludes meta-language negation,conversational implicated negation and the sentences with rhetorical question particle. The utterance itself can express negation in utterance negation,there are two utterance negation: explicit negation and implicit negation.Chapter 4 gives a particular description of Chinese implicative negation,and Chapter 5 gives a particular description of Chinese utterance negation.On the basis of our description,we use the spot-check method to calculate proportions of two big kinds and five small categories of negation in Chinese language.We find that implicated negation accounts for 35.71%,and utterance negation accounts for 64.29%which is the main form in Chinese pragmatic negation. In the five small categories,meta-language negation accounts for 51.95%,it means that explicit negation take an absolute status in all negative forms.Meta-language negation accounts for just 4.55%.We can see that this kind of pragmatic negation which pragmatists study most is the extreme negative phenomena.Our research has theoretical significance to the deepening of the people's cognition to speech acts,pragmatic implication,the relation between pragmatics and semantics.It also has reference value to the research of Chinese pragmatic strategy and the teaching of Chinese as a second language.