| The aim of this thesis is to provide a generalized account of the negation maker mei/meiyou in terms of its syntactic distribution and its relationship to aspects in Chinese.In the structural analysis of mei,the functional category NegP is excluded,for its lack of account of the aspectual nature of mei as well as its generation of ungrammatical sentential structures.Therefore,within the theoretical framework of Minimalist Program,a multi-leveled AspP is postulated;and mei/meiyou,as the negative counterpart of you in syntax,is placed on[Aspperf,AspPperf];meanwhile,as the negative counterpart of le in semantics,its presence prohibits the occurrence of le in the same sentence.In this thesis,AspPperf and AspPprog are headed by the negation marker mei and the progressive marker zai respectively;whereas suffix aspect markers like zhe and guo are base-generated on v,and move to Aspdur and Aspexp at Logic Form to get checked.With the structural hierarchy AspPperf>AspPprog>AspPdur/AspPexp>vP,the co-occurrence of aspect markers is made possible and the negation scope of mei includes all the elements that it c-commands.More importantly,with the reanalysis of the suffix aspect marker being base-generated on v,the proposed structure successfully avoids the potential violation of ECP or economical principle.The negation effects exerted by mei is to delete the endpoint of the situation.Bounded situations marked with explicit endpoint are negated by mei directly;whereas for unbounded situations,the negation of them is achieved by negating the bounded event which is also the precondition of the unbounded situation in question.Aspectual situations in close relation with mei are examined respectively for the revelation of the negating mechanism of mei.In addition,this thesis also touches upon several other linguistic problems within the proposed framework,such as the co-occurrence between bu and zhe,and the compatibility between mei and the modal neng. |
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