A Study On Connotation Of Metalinguistic Negation “bú Shì...ér Shì”

Negative expression is one of the commonest expressive ways in human language.Though there are lots of studies on negative expresssion “bú shì...ér shì...”in Chinese,most are traditional researches based on modern Chinese grammar.In recent years,metalinguistic negation “bú shì...ér shì...” gradually prospers especially in mass media to reach particular expressive effects.A number of studies on it tend to analyze it under the framework of pragmatics.With rapid development of cognitive linguistics,more and more studies lay emphases on cognitive mechanism and construction grammar,few uses other disciplinary knowledge or methods to give explanations,except David Wible&Eva Chen(2000)uses syntactic construction to interpret its causes.Following researches of Horn(1989)and Shen(1993)and by using formal semantic methods to interpret metalinguistic negation “bú shì...ér shì...”,this thesis holds the following three points: firstly,it basically meets ambiguity of negative operator put forth by Horn on the whole;secondly,“ér” can be left out as “búshì...(ér)shì...” to fulfill its metalingistic negation in form;thirdly,in terms of meaning,the key point for interpreting metalinguistic negation “bú shì...ér shì...”relies on what semantic relations are between the negative focus after “bú shì” and affirmative focus after “ér shì”.This thesis also holds that NPIs cannot appear in metalinguistic negation in English while metalinguistic negation “bú shì...ér shì...”allows for appearance of NPIs.