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The Negation Marker mei in Northeastern Mandarin

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Book cover Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11831))

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Abstract

Negation in Mandarin is a field that has been substantially studied, but researches on the negation of dialects are relatively lacking. This article conducts an analysis into the negation marker mei in Northeastern Mandarin and finds three different types of mei, including mei1, a verbal negator complementary to bu, mei2, an unaccusative intransitive verb which is characteristic in this dialect but has rarely been mentioned in previous researches, and mei3, a telic and static aspectual negator which involves a tone sandhi pattern. The tone sandhi of mei3 in Northeastern Mandarin has something to do with the 4-tone-transformation in Mandarin and can be extended to other negators and even some numerals.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Mei2 is not included as an independent entry in dictionaries of Standard Mandarin, and speakers of other Mandarin dialects such as Beijing Mandarin do not have this usage but would use a specific verb such as diu (丢, “to lose”) instead.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Foreign Languages, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Minglong Wei

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  1. Minglong Wei
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Correspondence to Minglong Wei .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

  2. Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing, China

    Yangsen Zhang

  3. Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China

    Pengyuan Liu

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Wei, M. (2020). The Negation Marker mei in Northeastern Mandarin. In: Hong, JF., Zhang, Y., Liu, P. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11831. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38189-9_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38189-9_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-38188-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-38189-9

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