Morpho-syntactic Typology of Chinese Negatives: A Cross-dialectal Survey

Abstract

This paper is a cross-dialectal survey of Chinese negatives, focusing on morpho-syntactic features. The main observations are as follows. 1. It has been a universal rule in Chinese to have different words for general negation and possession/existence negation respectively. In Northern (and Middle Chinese), the two kinds of negatives are different with [p-/f-] for general negation and [m-] for possessive negation respectively whereas in the South both kinds are in the form of [m-]. 2. Grarnmaticalization makes negatives more general, hence lessening the size of the negative lexicon, while on the other hand, lexicalization has negatives fused with other words and brings about new negatives. The high text frequency of negatives weakens their phonetic forms, while stressing the negative meaning leads to reinforcement of negative forms. 3. Negative-predicate ordering is the only order seen in Chinese, which is true over time and across dialects. Some seemingly complicated cases do not in fact violate this order. 4. In Northwestern dialects, there is a strong tendency for the negative to be put immediately before the predicative verb/adjective despite its scope (e. g., 'very not good' means 'not very good'), which leads to a violation of the famous correlation between scope and order in Chinese. This should result from a head-attraction of clitics. 5. While Old Chinese employs bu and fou for the English adverbial not and the reply “no” respectively, the Mandarin negative bu serves both functions. Sometimes, bu can be analyzed either way. The double analyses could have lead to the reanalysis of bu as not into bu as no. However, in southern dialects like Wu, there are no negatives for no. It might be because adverbial negatives in those dialects never serve as a short reply thus cannot be reanalyzed this way. This constraint reflects a more general rule in these dialects, i. e., a verb, adjective or adverb alone can hardly function as a short independent sentence.