https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4692-0326
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ABSTRACT
Negation and spatial experiences are basic to human cognition. While both should be indispensable to the exploration of each other, the relationship between them has seldom been touched upon. This study takes the Chinese negative marker mei (you) as a case study by investigating its evolutionary path in relation to spatial cognition. Drawing on corpus-based data across three historical stages before Modern Chinese, the study yields the following findings. First, the original meaning of mei involves dynamic spatial movement, which can extend to abstract domains. Second, rich concrete meanings of mei trigger semantic schematization at the second stage, spatial cognition playing a fundamental role. Third, the negative marker use of mei combines with you at the third stage, which is attributed to the fact that the spatial existence of you fits with the semantic component of existence in mei. The significance of the study lies in three aspects: first, the division of historical stages accords with the key turning points in the evolution of Chinese; second, the exploration follows a diachronic development, instead of being based merely on static performance; and third, this perspective sheds light on the role of spatial cognition in the conceptualization of negation in both Chinese and other languages.
Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to Professor Wenbin Wang for his valuable comments and support on an earlier version of this manuscript. Additionally, I owe thanks to the Editor-in-chief of AJL and two anonymous reviewers who provided very constructive and helpful comments to improve the quality of the manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study were derived from the Chinese National Corpus (CNC), which is available in the public domain at: http://corpus.zhonghuayuwen.org/index.aspx.
Notes
1 When both mei and meiyou are mentioned, I will use the form mei (you).
2 However, as pointed out by Mosegaard Hansen and Visconti (Citation2012), earlier than Jespersen’s work, Millet (Citation1912) mentioned the driving force of pragmatics in the evolution of standard negation.
3 Available at: http://corpus.zhonghuayuwen.org/index.aspx.
4 There are other classifications of Chinese language history, such as Li (Citation2019) and Traugott and Dasher (Citation2002). The present classification adopts a standard approach to classifying Chinese history since the evolutionary path of mei accords with turning points in Chinese history.
5 Shi (Citation2015) holds that meiyou did not appear until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that is during the Song Dynasty.
6 The abbreviations used in glossing follow those of the Leipzig Glossing Rules with the addition of INT ‘interrogative’, INTERJ ‘interjection’ and PRON ‘pronoun’.
7 Modern Chinese starts from the Republic of China, as has been widely acknowledged.
8 Refer to Talmy (Citation2000, p. 259) for the term “event frame”.
9 The portion put on “stage” or foregrounded is identified as the general locus of viewing attention (Langacker, Citation2008, p. 66).
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Yuan Zhang
Yuan Zhang, Ph.D., is Professor at the School of Foreign Languages in Shandong Normal University, China. She has been a visiting scholar in the Linguistics Departments in both University of California, Berkeley and Rice University. She was also a postdoctoral researcher at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Her major fields of professional interest include the contrastive study of Chinese and foreign languages, a cognitive linguistics approach to language, linguistic representations of space, negation, the evolution of language, constructionalization and the grammaticalization of language.