A Study Of Constructions Using Negation To Convey Affirmative Meanings In English And Chinese

Affirmation and negation permeate in all human language systems. They are used to express affirmative and negative meanings respectively. However, we may encounter many expressions that use negatives to express affirmative meanings. After searching for the two corpuses, the thesis has found some most frequently used constructions. And a research is conducted from the perspective of construction grammar, which proves to be an especially effective approach in the explanation of novel and peripheral language phenomena.In the thesis, the author collected research materials mainly from Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) and Beijing University Online Corpus. The constructions found are categorized into three major groups: double negation constructions, rhetorical question constructions and constructions containing redundant negation. Relevant constructions are described and analyzed from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic perspectives. Furthermore, the thesis also attempts to explore the cognitive and productive mechanisms of these constructions to find out the motivation behind these linguistic phenomena. After detailed study the author finds out some common features of these constructions and that the two languages share some similar linguistic patterns which correspond to each other in some respects of syntax and semantics. What is more, these constructions in both languages roughly share similar pragmatic functions, either as an emphasis of the utterance or as a euphemistic way of communication.The cognitive mechanism of these constructions can be related to the figure and ground theory. Affirmatives, which are used to show the occurrence of events, are usually viewed as the figure; while negatives showing the non-occurrence of events are considered as the ground. So when the negatives are chosen over the affirmatives in verbal communication, the comparatively unexpected negatives can stand out from the ground and will trigger more attention and thoughts.It is hoped that the study can serve as a reference for English teaching and translation, and help language learners gain a better understanding of the characteristics of both English and Chinese. It is also hoped that this tentative study can contribute to traditional researches and can serve to inspire more researchers home and abroad for a better study into the field.