A Contrastive Study Of Negative Polarity Item Between English And Chinese

The phenomenon that some expressions (either words or idiomatic phrases) with limited distribution, occur in negative context exists in both English and Chinese. This kind of expressions is called Negative Polarity Item (NPI) in this paper. Both in English and Chinese, NPIs belong to various syntactic categories, but are still controlled by the same laws. Via contrastive study on NPI between English and Chinese, this paper proved that NPI in Chinese shares a common feature with that in English. Through comparative analysis of English and Chinese typical NPIs, this paper tries to find out the features of NPIs in syntactic distributions and semantic features. Therefore, different classes of negative polarity items in different languages may have different reasons to exist, but whatever the reasons of its existence; polarity item is governed by the same mechanism. A cross-linguistic study would help to uncover the internal mechanism of English and Chinese languages and exemplify language universal principles.In syntactic study, both English and Chinese NPIs are affected by negative licensing operator. NPI in this paper can be divided into two groups:one is negative polarity determiner (also called indefinite NP); the other is negative polarity adverb. The comparison between English and Chinese NPIs in syntactic aspect reveals that there are some differences between distribution and licensing in Phonetic Form. Both of these NPIs in English and Chinese are C-Commanded by negative operator that is subject to Principle A. But there are some differences in the distribution of Chinese NPIs. Chinese indefinite NP in object place can be preposed, but in Logical Form it is still in the scope of negative operator.On semantic level, both English and Chinese NPIs share similar semantic features, and are constrained by monotonic downward entailment, showing the common features. According to common features in Chinese and English semantically, this paper analyses NPIs in aspect of surface semantic feature, polar semantic feature, tries to find out some slight differences between some typical NPIs. It can be draw:negative operator in negative structure contains the basic negative sense, but NPI is in adjunct position, and does not contain negative sense itself that can not afford the actual content of negative meaning. So NPI is not necessary for semantic understanding, and does not affect the interpretation of negative meanings. Negative operator constrains NPI to form a stable grammatical meaning; the logical semantic meaning is equivalent of the universal quantifier, which is used to express the whole amount of the negation or negative quality. NPI is strongly combined with semantic choice of negative operator.