| The purpose of this thesis is to account in a generalized way for two facts about negation in Chinese. One is that the Chinese negative marker bu cannot co-occur with the perfective aspect marker le; the other is that the Chinese negative marker bu is incompatible with the manner phrase in the V-de construction.We claim that the functional category NegP postulated by Pollock (1989) for English and French can be extended to Chinese and that NegP analysis can account better for the syntactic distribution of the Chinese negative marker bu. We propose that the negative marker bu is placed in Spec,NegP, while the head of NegP is left empty; and that the complement of NegP is usually an AspP, which is headed by Aspect markers, or AUXP when there are auxiliaries occupying AUX. We argue that Chinese is an Asp-lowering language; its perfective aspect marker le is lowered from Asp onto V, and the trace left behind in the Asp node by the moved head should be properly head governed. This can be satisfied when there are auxiliary verbs. But when there are no auxiliary verbs, (because the head of NegP is empty) nothing properly head governing the trace, an ECP violation will arise. Since we can assume that the postverbal adjunct marker -de originated from the Asp of AspP, the incompatibility between bu and the manner phrase in the V-de construction can also be explained. In addition, this thesis touches upon several other theoretical issues that lie at the core of linguistic research in Chinese, such as word order, topicalization, tense and aspect, postverbal and preverbal adjuncts.In this thesis, we provide a purely formal analysis of a number of long-term controversies about the syntactic distribution of the Chinese negative marker bu. We carried out this investigation in the framework of Transformational Generative Grammar (TG), and the goal is to describe these phenomena in terms of recognized language universals, without using rules specific to Chinese. |
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