A Study of Negation-Indicated Words in Vietnamese

Abstract

Negation understood in normal sense is "rejecting the existence, the necessity of something". Thus, along with affirmation, negation is an important manipulation of the human perception toward reality and things mentioned. Negation in speech is formed by lexical means (lexical words, functional words) or the structure of sentences. This article examines the similarities and the differences between two functional words, which are “không” and “chẳng” in Vietnamese under the perspectives of the syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. Under the syntactic perspectives, the position of “không” and “chẳng” normally positions before language expressions which contain negative sense, but “không” can be combined with nouns. In terms of semantics, “không “and “chẳng” express negation and rejection of what is going to utter (negative objects can be a phenomenon, things, activities, statuses, characteristics, etc.). The negative nuance of “không” is objective, whereas the negative of “chẳng” is subjective that evaluates and emphasizes the state of affairs..., rather various and vivid. In regards to pragmatics, the objective negation enables “không” to occur in all language styles, such as in sciences, administration, journals, conversational style, activities, etc. The article collects data from the literary works in different genres such as proses, poems, short stories, novels, daily communication, and two dictionaries. To clarify and distinguish the mentioned functional words, the depicted and replacing methods were used.