Subjectivity And Subjectification In English Transferred Negation

The linguistic phenomenon that negative elements are moved from one position to another in sentences has been of great interest to many scholars. They have studied it mainly from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic perspectives since Jespersen summarized a large number of sentences consisting of negative transfer. But their studies are not integrated and systematic. With the development of cognitive linguistics, some scholars have attempted to analyze transferred negation(TN) from the perspective of conceptualization to explore its cognitive motivation. However, they fail to offer a convincing answer because they did not analyze different sentence structures in TN.In recent years, subjectivity and subjectification have aroused a group of scholars’ interest. Subjectivity and subjectification play a significant role in the uncovering of how meaning is created and construed. Languages not only convey propositional meanings, but also express the speaker’s attitudes or emotions in construal.Having made an adequate description of TN, this study conducts the analyses of TN in English from the perspective of subjectivity and subjectification by Langacker in synchronic level. By comparing TN with direct negation(DN), this study has explored the cognitive motivations behind the negative transfer. Moreover, the paper also summarizes the linguistic changes in TN in the process of subjectification. The major findings are as follows.First, TN contains many sentence structures and it has been classified into two types in this study: TN in simple sentences and TN in complex sentences.Second, both TN and DN can be used in a certain context, but people are more likely to adopt TN, which is associated with speaker’s involvement in construal. That is to say, the usage of TN is influenced by the speaker’s subjective expression.Third, all sentence structures in TN have subjectivity. Speakers adopt TN in communication in order to show their subjective intention, so TN has certain degree of subjectivity once it appears.Fourth, with speaker’s subjective involvement in construal increasing, linguistic structures would change. For example, speakers would omit “that” in sentences like “I don’t think that...” or regard “I don’t think” as a parenthesis. Moreover, different positions of this parenthesis are also influenced by speaker’s subjective involvement in construal.This study will not only help people have a better comprehension of this language phenomenon but also have inspiration to future research on TN.