Diachronic Development of the Chinese Negative 沒 from a Typological Perspective

초록

Two factors contributed to the emergence of mei 沒 in the course of diachronicdevelopment of Chinese. The first factor is semantic and functional in its nature. Bythe mechanism of metonymy, the meaning of mei 沒 as a main predicate wasextended from “to sink” and “to disappear” to “not to exist.” The second factor isphonological. Wu 無 and wei 未, which had been used as an existential negative anda perfective negative respectively, lost the [m]-initial, and consequently their status asm-negatives as well. This caused mei 沒, which semantically was undergoinggrammaticalization into an existential negative, to substitute for the pre-existingexistential negative wu 無 first. After the property of boundedness is firmlyestablished in Chinese predicates later on, mei 沒 extended its meaning and functionto become a perfective negative, finally attaining the status as a new m-negative. However, the substitution of existential and perfective negatives by mei 沒 mainlyoccurred in the Northern dialects only. In many of the Southern dialects in which the[m]-initial of wu 無 and wei 未 was retained, an existential negative and a perfectivenegative are still distinct, and no substitution by mei 沒 has occurred. Another noteworthy aspect of the development of the negatives in Chinese is thatit reflects the development of Chinese from a synthetic to analytic language. Anegative with a complex function developed into a negative with the sole function ofnegating, as illustrated by the development of mei 沒, meiyou 沒有, and mei 沒 V. The development of the negative pairs such as wei 未 vs. weiceng 未曾, wu 無 vs. wuyou 無有, fei 非 vs. feishi 非是 can be viewed in the same vein. Theanalyticization process resulted in the reduction of the multitude of negatives to justtwo, namely, bu 不 and mei 沒.

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