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Part of
Interfaces in Grammar
Edited by Jianhua Hu and Haihua Pan
[Language Faculty and Beyond 15] 2019
► pp. 245–282

Chapter 9
Focus, negation and event quantification in Chinese

How focus helps shape negation in natural language

| City University of Hong Kong

Chinese negators, bu and mei, translated as “not” in English, are assumed to be focus-sensitive indiscriminately. In this paper, I argue that unlike bu, mei does not lexically encode a dependency on the placement of focus, due to the failure of semantic focus to override its syntactic constraint. Syntax has made mei inherently a negative existential quantifier of situations. The role of focus in mei-sentences is to provide the backgrounded event description. Material within the TP scope of mei, excluding the focus, will be structurally mapped to the background part to set up its restrictive domain, and everything within its scope to the nuclear scope. Therefore, although falling under the same category, negators do not necessarily demonstrate the same focus dependency.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The problem of mei
    • 1.2Main ideas to be proposed in this paper
  • 2.Sentences as descriptions of events
    • 2.1Herburger’s (2000) event quantification analysis of focused quantifiers
  • 3. Mei and focus – an event-based account
    • 3.1The negation domain of mei
      • 3.1.1 Mei as a situation negator: Syntactic attachment of mei to -you
      • 3.1.2Focus does not affect the syntactic relation of mei with you
    • 3.3 Mei does not directly associate with focus
  • 4.Reanalyzing mei as a negative existential event quantifier
    • 4.1Dependency of mei on the non-focused part for backgrounded event description
    • 4.2Does the existential presupposition of events always exist in mei-negation?
    • 4.3Existential presupposition of at least one alternative to the focus
  • 5.Discussion: Information-structural characteristics of bu, mei(-you) and bu-shi
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.15.09lee
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