Contrastive Analysis: Negation in Mandarin and English

• Main Authors: LIU, HSUAN-CHEN, 劉宣辰
• Other Authors: HSIEH, FU-TSAI
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/35wb53

碩士 === 銘傳大學 === 華語文教學碩士學位學程 === 107 === This paper uses contrastive analysis to compare negation in Mandarin and English. The research purpose is to provide a helpful teaching suggestion for Mandarin teachers to facilitate students’ learning about negation in Chinese through the comparisons with English. The literature review introduces the negation in Mandarin and English respectively, followed by the comparisons between Mandarin negation and English negation. Li and Thompson’s perspectives for categorizing negation in Chinese is applied (1981). Three negative particles in Mandarin are discussed, including bù ‘not’, méi(yǒu) ‘not’, and bié ‘Don’t’. While introducing the negation in English, this paper agrees with the concept of clause negation proposed by Quirk et al. (1985) and imperative negation mentioned by Huddleston and Pullum (2002). The clause negation includes ‘not’ and ‘no’, and they can be grouped as verbal negation and non-verbal negation. After introducing the negation in Mandarin and English separately, the similarities and differences of them are pointed out in the following chapter. In this paper, the clause negation in English and bù ‘not’ and méi(yǒu) ‘not’ in Mandarin are compared together due to their similar characteristics, and the imperative negation in Mandarin and English are compared together. Furthermore, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (1999, 2006) indicated that comparisons are important in foreign language teaching. Therefore, this paper provides a three-step teaching suggestion for teachers to maximize students’ learning on the topic of negation through comparisons.