A Study Of "Chayidian Mei VP" And "Chayidian Bu VP" Structures

Despite a large number of researches on the structure of" chayidian+negator+ VP", controversies still remain about it. As for the adverb chayidian and the structures of chayidian VP and chayidian mei VP in modern Chinese, scholars have done substaintial investigations from various perspectives. Most studies focus on analysising the redundancy of mei and disambiguating the structure when its affirmative form and negative form express the same meaning. Negator is inevitable in the negative form of the structure. What's more, the negator here plays a vital role in the structure. Mei is not the only negator in modern Chinese, likewise, bu is one of the most typical negators with highest frequency in using. Nevertheless, explanations about the differences between bu and mei are pretty vague and related notions are even disputable.The thesis adopts the classification of verb put forward by Ma Qingzhu (1988) who categorizes verbs from perspectives of their grammatical functions and semantic meanings. He proposes that verbs in Chinese can be divided into two kinds, volitional verbs and nonvolitional verbs. In addition, nonvolitional verbs can be further classified as verbs of property and verbs of change. Combining with contemporary linguistic theories, this thesis adopts the structure of chayidians (mei/bu) VP as research objectives and sets out to conduct in-depth analyses over certain key issues so as to explore the collocation of chayidian+bu/mei with different kinds of verbs or verb phrases from perspectives of syntax and semantics.Based on abundant linguistic data and theories as well as Ma Qingzhu's classification of verbs in Chinese, the following explanations are drawn in the thesis: 1) Chayidian can collocate with volitional verbs and nonvolitional verbs with syntactic restriction, and their collocation forms are different.2) It is found from the comparison that negators mei and bu can both modify volitional verbs and nonvolitional verbs, however, what kinds of verb phrases can collocate with it depends on various factors.3) Mei and bu can be inserted into the position between the adverb chayidian and VP; nevertheless, when collocating with volitional verbs and involitional verbs, the new sentence patterns that consist of three parts mentioned above will have a great change.Finally, the thesis sheds lingt on the comparative study of the constraction of chayidian+negator+VP. It would be of value in language research and language teaching.