Abstract
Negation can be conveyed through various forms in a language. In Chinese, bù is the most common negative form, and it can also be a morpheme of a compound word which expresses negation and/or concepts closely associated with negation, e.g. modality and contrast. In order to capture most types of Chinese words carrying these concepts, we investigate Chinese words containing bù. This study first classifies bù-related words into seven categories according to the word structure and the negative connotation of bù as a morpheme retained in the word. The categorisation is then applied to the wordlists of a research article corpus and a conversational corpus. The results show that there are many fewer occurrences of bù as a negator in research articles than in conversation, and that there is greater use of four-syllable Chinese idioms (chéngyǔ) in research articles than in conversation. In addition, different sets of bù-related words are used to express contrast and modality.
Highlights
IntroductionIn the genres of academic writing, negation can be used as a form of rhetorical device for indirectness (Hinkel 1997), for increasing the level of contradiction between the proposition and the expectation (Jordan 1998), and sometimes to express negative assertions related to factual knowledge (Vincze et al 2008)
This study first classifies bù-related words into seven categories according to the word structure and the negative connotation of bù as a morpheme retained in the word
In the genres of academic writing, negation can be used as a form of rhetorical device for indirectness (Hinkel 1997), for increasing the level of contradiction between the proposition and the expectation (Jordan 1998), and sometimes to express negative assertions related to factual knowledge (Vincze et al 2008)
Summary
In the genres of academic writing, negation can be used as a form of rhetorical device for indirectness (Hinkel 1997), for increasing the level of contradiction between the proposition and the expectation (Jordan 1998), and sometimes to express negative assertions related to factual knowledge (Vincze et al 2008). Negation is often used to express denial of a specific idea existing in the target academic community (Pagano 1994: 259). Halliday presupposed that the majority of the academic community he was writing for would assume a text is a grammatical unit. The automatic retrieval of factual knowledge from scientific articles is a challenging task when negation is involved, owing to its diversity of form and function. Previous studies have attempted to understand negation from different points of view.
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