A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Double Negation

As a universally used linguistic structure, double negation has long attracted the attention of scholars in Chinese and foreign countries. But so far the research of double negation is limited to the study and analysis of negative words, negative markers and the surface structure of double negation, and is also restricted to one particular language. In the present paper, based on contrastive linguistics and cognitive linguistics, we launch a comparison between English double negation and its Chinese counterpart from the perspective of syntax, semantics and pragmatics to identify similarities and differences between them, and furthermore we also attempt to elaborate the causes and motivations for its meaning.As a special language phenomenon in which the meaning and form contradicts each other, is double negation on earth positive sentence or negative one? We think that it is a special kind of negative sentence. In this thesis, we attempt to give a revised definition to double negation as the following:a language phenomenon which uses two negative expressions at the same time in a sentence to eliminate the negative meaning of a general negative sentence.Based on a large number of linguistic facts, it is concluded that the structures of English double negation and its Chinese counterpart are in common to a large extent, but there are also some differences between them. The reason is that the way to express the concept of negation in English is much more complicated and diverse. Such forms are involved---- negative affixes, negative words, negative phrases and certain fixed structures to express the negative meaning, while in Chinese the approach to express the concept of the negative sense is relatively homogeneous, and it generally indicates negation by using words like mei, meiyou, bu, bie("没,没有,不,别")etc. The syntactic position of English double negative is also relatively flexible. It can be used as predicative, adverbial, and even can be used as predicate. The syntactic position of Chinese double negative is relatively fixed, usually in a position of predicate.Semantically, English double negation and Chinese double negation can be both used to enhance certainty with a firmer tone or to weaken the affirmative, which is more euphemistic and polite than the meaning expressed by a general positive sentence. In addition to these two kinds of meaning, the double negative sentences in English, can also strengthen the meaning of negation and weaken the negative sense.Based on iconicity, we explain the link between the conceptual structures and syntactic structures of double negative sentence, so bringing the research of double negation to the height of human cognition. Quantitative iconicity holds that the more informative, more important and more difficult the concept is, the longer and the more complicated the language is. Compared to an ordinary positive sentence or a negative sentence, the form of double negation is more complex, and the sentence is much longer, so the additional meaning and implication is also richer and deeper than an ordinary negative sentence or a positive sentence.