Negation in Chinese : a corpus-based study

2013

El sistema de polaridad negativa en ingles ha sido objeto de amplio estudio en las ultimas decadas. La mayoria de los linguistas han prestado atencion a una serie de fenomenos dentro de este sistema que no observan lo que se considera la regla general. En este articulo me centrare en cuatro aspectos de la negacion que no siguen las normas estandar y que cada vez son mas frecuentes en el lenguaje utilizado por los hablantes nativos de ingles: la forma verbal negativa ain’t, la coletilla invariable innit, la negacion multiple y el uso del adverbio never como forma negativa de pasado. Para el analisis de estas formas negativas, me referire, en primer lugar, a su tratamiento en las principales gramaticas del ingles de referencia y, luego, a los resultados del analisis de datos extraidos de varios corpus y de otras fuentes. En la seccion final se hacen una serie de consideraciones sobre las implicaciones de todo lo anterior para la ensenanza de este punto gramatical en el ambito universi...

Lingua, 2018

Although Mandarin Chinese (MC) has been characterized as a language in which two negative expressions within the boundaries of a single sentential domain cancel each other to yield a positive reading, this paper examines whether a single negation reading may in fact result under certain conditions. The results of an online perception experiment performed by 114 native speakers of MC showed that single negation readings were indeed obtained, particularly when the first of the two negative expressions was an adjunct (i.e., có ngláibù/ có ngláiméi(yǒ u) 'never'), and when there was stress on the second negative expression (i.e., the negative markers méi(yǒ u) 'not' and bù 'not').

Linguistics and Literature Studies, 2020

Negation is crucial to semantics. Negative polarity items (NPI) play an important role in negation. There are a few studies on NPIs in Chinese, but so far no research is on NPIs in Chinese existential sentences (ESs). Because the existential verb “you” (have) is combined with the negative marker “mei” (not) in Chinese ESs, unlike in other types of sentences where “meiyou” (not have) together function as a negative marker. We wonder whether this combination of a single negative marker and an existential verb affects the licensing conditions of NPIs. This is why we study negative polarity items in Chinese ESs. We investigate the variety of negative polarity items which can be allowed in Chinese ESs, and their licensing conditions. It is found that four types of negative polarity items can occur in Chinese ESs, i.e. negative polarity adjectives, negative polarity adverbs, negative polarity wh-words, and negative polarity ‘one’ phrase as minimizer. In this paper, we just focus on the last two types of negative polarity items that can occur in Chinese ESs. The linguistic facts show that negative polarity wh-words (except ‘duoshao’) and negative polarity ‘one’ phrase as minimizer in Chinese ESs can be licensed by negative sentences, yes-no interrogative sentences, A-not-A interrogative sentences, and the antecedent clause of a conditional. We claim that negative polarity wh-words (except ‘duoshao’) and negative polarity ‘one’ phrase as minimizer in Chinese ESs are strong NPIs. It has been found that NPIs can be licensed by negative sentences in Chinese according to the previous studies. Our new contribution to the field is that we have found NPIs in Chinese ESs can also be licensed by yes-no interrogatives, A-not-A interrogatives and the antecedent clause of a conditional apart from negative sentences. This finding is to some extent accountable for NPIs in other Chinese constructions.

A universal property of natural language is that every language is able to express negation. Every language has some device at its disposal to reverse the truth value of a certain sentence. However, languages may differ to quite a large extent as to how they express this negation. Not only do languages vary with respect to the position of negative elements, also the form of negative elements and the interpretation of sentences that consist of multiple negative elements are subject to broad cross-linguistic variation. The study to the behaviour of sentential negation has therefore strongly been guided by the question as to what determines the possible ways that sentential negation can manifest itself. A conclusion of the article will be that the behaviour of negation in natural language strongly deviates from what intuitively might be expected.

Languages may vary greatly in the way they express negation. Most languages exploit specifically designated negative markers, such as English not. Many languages may also use negative indefinites (such as English nobody or nothing) to express negation. The behavior of these negative indefinites is subject to crosslinguistic variation: In some languages, negative markers and negative indefinites cannot express a single semantic negation (nobody didn't come means that everybody came and not that nobody came), but in other languages they can. Languages with these properties, such as Italian, are called Negative Concord languages. In this review, I discuss the difference between negative indefinites in languages that exhibit Negative Concord and languages that do not. I also compare the behaviors of negative indefinites in languages that exhibit Negative Concord and so-called Negative Polarity Items. This article provides an accurate overview of recent developments in the study of negation and negative dependencies.

The Oxford Handbook of Negation. Viviane Déprez & M. Teresa Espinal (eds.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 91-116., 2020

This chapter discusses a number of central phenomena in the typology of negation, building on state-of-the-art typological research. The focus lies on standard negation, prohibitive negation, existential negation, and the negation of indefinites. Cross-linguistic variation is central in the discussion, and for most phenomena the question is addressed as to what extent a certain pattern is frequent or rare. As far as it is possible, observed patterns are provided with explanations, which are often diachronic. Thus we discuss the Jespersen and Negative Existential Cycles and we venture a hypothesis on the existence of an 'Ascriptive negation cycle'. For a number of phenomena we also discuss areality.

ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, 1999

This paper is concerned with the syntax of negative sentences and negative polarity items (NPIs) in English and Japanese and argues for the validity of a feature-checking analysis in the framework of Chomsky (1995). It is demonstrated that the feature-checking analysis based on feature specification on Neg and NPIs can present a unified view of negative sentences and that different distributions of NPIs naturally follow from it. At the same time, it is argued that negative sentences suggest a locality condition supplementary to the Minimal Link Condition in Chomsky (1995), in support of Manzini (1998). This locality condition is incorporated into the analysis as the NEG-Convention.

This paper intends to investigate factors such as formality, discourse, phonological environment and verb function or type with a more recent set of data from the British National Corpus (1960’s-1990’s), and compare it with the results of Kjellmer (1998) whose study used data from the LOB corpus (early 1960’s) to see whether his and Krug (1994)’s prediction about the trend towards informality in English is veridical.

Language and Linguistics Compass, 2007

This article is an overview of the current state of typological research on negation. Structures expressing standard negation -the negation of declarative verbal main clauses -can be classified on the basis of the status of the negative marker, or on the basis of the structure of the negative clause as a whole. Structural similarities and differences (symmetry and asymmetry) between negatives and affirmatives can be observed and classified into different types which can then be offered functional explanations. Negative strategies used in imperatives, existentials and nonverbal clauses often differ from standard negation; these differences are exemplified and discussed. The interaction between negative indefinite pronouns and standard negation shows interesting cross-linguistic variation in terms of whether the latter co-occurs with the indefinite and whether the indefinite is inherently negative. Some cross-linguistic observations on diachronic developments and on the interaction between negation and modality and negation and focus are also briefly discussed.