Bu, Its Adjacent Words And FEO

The thesis concentrates on the semantic properties and syntactic positions of the negative marker Bu. The proposal of NegP Hypothesis has been demonstrated a successful account for the facts of a number of Indo-European languages which have a relatively rich inflectional system. However, amount of studies made so far have shown that it is not applicable in Chinese. According to the Minimalist Principle, elements that can not be projected can be derived by adjunction. Thereafter, we assume Bu as an adjunct base-generated via adjunction.Ernst argues that adjunct is syntactically free in principle: syntactically, adjunct has more than one base-generated position, and there are no major syntactic restrictions on either the category or the level of a phrase to which something adjoins (that is to say, adjunction to arguments and to levels of XP, X'and X0 are all possible); however, it has to meet the semantic requirements of the Logic Form. FEO Calculus (Fact-Event Object Calculus) proposed by Ernst is the direct reflection of this view.Since the syntactic and semantic systems of natural language dovetail to such an extent that robust results on either side can tell us something about the nature of the corresponding parts of the other. It is this property that the FEO Calculus is based on to seek for the syntactic properties of adjuncts via analyzing their semantic properties. By the application of scope-based FEO Calculus, this thesis analyzes the semantic requirements and syntactic positions of the negative word Bu. The analysis is based on the interaction between the negative adverb Bu, which is syntactically free in principle, and its adjacent word such as a lexical verb, a modal auxiliary or an adverb—with special attention given to the interaction between the negative adverb Bu and the universal adverb Dou, and classifies negation into FEO negation and non-FEO negation, which is also named as sentential negation and constituent negation. This pair of new terms has fleshed out the pair of the traditional terms from a new stance. In the case study of BuDou and DouBu, they are found to be of different structures with the fact that the two Bus are adjoined to different constituents: the first one is adjoined to the adverb phrase Dou, while the second to a syntactic projection containing an FEO; and thus the former forms constituent negation, whereas the latter sentential negation, with the latter entailing the former. Adjunct analysis has united constituent negation and sentential negation. It shows the correspondence between syntactic negation and semantic negation and can render a more effective answer to multiple kinds of negation phenomena about Bu.