현대중국어 부정사와 문장 종결 조건에 대한 소고

Abstract

Negation refers to the logical operation that changes the truth value of a proposition to its opposite. This is typically achieved by adding a negator to an affirmative proposition. However, in actual sentences, it can be observed that negators serve not only to change the truth value of a proposition but also have additional functions. For example, sentences like “小孩哭”, “女生唱”, and “這件事, 我們現在提” are often considered ungrammatical or inappropriate unless provided with additional context or intonation cues. However, by adding negators like ‘沒’ or ‘不’, more complete and easily acceptable sentences can be formed, such as “小孩沒哭”, “女生不唱”, and “這件事, 我們暫且不提”. This paper argues that in modern Mandarin, negators can function as sentence-completing elements. This paper analyzed the relation between negators and sentence-completing in three levels. At the propositional level, negators can only affect the truthfulness of a proposition and create the contrary or contradictory proposition. However, the change of the truth-value can’t directly affect the integrality of the sentence. At the modal level, negator ‘沒’ can provide temporal information regarding the events described in the proposition, thus can fulfill the sentence-completing condition. However, negator ‘不’ is used merely to negate other modal components. At the pragmatic level, regardless of which negator that is used, negation helps the establishment of the conversational context and facilitates speech acts of refusal and denial. Being able to conduct a certain speech act, the negated sentence can properly function in a consersational situation, and thus be completed.