A Syntactic And Semantic Analysis Of Nominal Expression In The Scope Of Negation In Mandarin Chinese

Negation as a marked grammatical category, opposite to position, has always been a focus in the study of scholars at home and abroad. Predecessors’researches mainly involve the scope of negation, the objects of negation and the association phenomenon of negation’s nominal focus with its focus-sensitive operators, while the specificity of the nominal expressions in the scope of negation has not been paid enough attention, this paper focuses on the the syntactic semantic features of nominal expressions within the scope of negation or related to negation.The nominal expressions which can appear in the scope of negation are often definite, such as personal pronouns, proper nouns, structures of demonstrative pronouns followed by quantity phrases and genitive constructions. NPs modified by a cardinal numeral can not appear in the scope of negation and the appearance of the bare NPs is unnatural. However, through some grammatical means such as symmetry or stress focus, NPs modified by a cardinal numeral can appear in the scope of negation, and at this time the semantic interpretation of NPs modified by a cardinal numeral is definite. Therefore, we think that the nominal expressions in the scope of negation must be definite. We can define the term "definiteness" from whether the listener can identify the referents of the nominal expressions or not.The nominal expressions which can appear in the scope of negation must be definite. Based on this point of view, the paper has been analyzed the syntactic projections of the nominal expressions in the scope of negation and the syntactic position of the negative marker, indicating that "bu" is the adjunction of VP, the scope of negation is the command domain of the negative marker, the nominal expressions in the scope of negation should project to FocP and then check the feathers on the explicit syntactic derivation or implicit LF. The paper also points out that focus plays an important role in the appearance of nominal expression in the negative sentence. According to Chinese information Arrangement rules and marked relevance model, we assert that focus is definite.The paper has been further proved the previous hypothetical conclusion through the investigation of the typical indefinite form"yi+classifier+noun". When"yi+classifier+noun" and negative words co-occur in a sentence,"yi+classifier+noun" must be moved to or base generated in a position before the negative words to get focus feather and to realize the definite interpretation. At this point, we has reached a unified conclusion in this paper, that is, the nominal expressions within the scope of negation all project into a focus projection FocP. The form"yi+classifier+noun"is the negative polarity composition, indicating the meaning of universal quantification or zhoubianyi.