Two Cores in Chinese Negation System: A Corpus-Based View

This paper presents an empirical study of grammatical distribution of Chinese negation markers based on available corpus data. Most previous studies adopted theoretical approaches and focused on the roles of two dominant negators, bu and mei(you) in Chinese negation, paying very little attention to other complementary negators such as bie and fei . To achieve a comprehensive view on Chinese negation, we examine 14 negators and their semantic distribution in terms of substantial statistical support from empirical data. With respect to the distinctive behaviors of different negators due to their own valences in collocating with other words, we propose that bu and mei(you) are two cores in Chinese negation and the negation senses of other complementary negators are rooted in either of them.