Курсовая с практикой на тему Category of negation in modern English

Содержание:

Introduction 3
1. Category of negation in linguistic 5
1.1 Category of negation in language 5
1.2 Ways of expressing negation in modern English 10
2. Category of negation in fiction (on the material of negative adverbs in “Too much happiness” by A. Munro) 15
2.1 Ways of expressing the negation 15
2.2 Negative adverbs in “Too much happiness” by A. Munro 18
Conclusion 25
Bibliography 26

Введение:

Despite a lot of research conducted by linguists, the problem of negation remains poorly understood. There is still some misunderstanding in the statements of scientists about the nature and semantics of negation. Some scientists (F. Hegel and S. L. Frank) view the category of negation as a fact of life, some other (O. Jespersen, 1958 etc.) view the category of negation as an illusion of human perception. In their opinion, denial is a purely subjective manifestation of the human psyche, acting not as a reflection of the reality of the subject, but as a reflection of his psychological and emotional feelings.
This can be explained by the huge number of ways of denying in language. They are not only grammatical means, but lexical as well, and even idioms with a negative component.
The initial understanding of negation as a linguistic, functional and semantic category, expressing the presence of a negative relationship between the elements of the semantic structure, manifested at different language levels and carrying a certain functional load, is the basis of our work.
Our object is the category of negation in language.
The subject of this work is the category of negation in modern English.
The aim of this work is to study negative adverbs in modern English.
The tasks:
1) to analyze the category of negation in linguistic;
2) to explore ways of expressing negation in modern English;
3) to study negative adverbs in modern English;
4) to explore negative adverbs in “Too much happiness” by A. Munro.
The material of the study is novel “Too much happiness” by A. Munro.
Alice Munro is a critically well-regarded Canadian short-story writer who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.
Born in Canada in 1931, writer Alice Munro, primarily known for her short stories, attended the University of Western Ontario. Her first collection of stories was published as Dance of the Happy Shades. In 2009, Munro won the Man Booker International Prize. That same year, she published the short-story collection Too Much Happiness. In 2013, at age 82, Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Alice Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw on July 10, 1931, in Wingham, Ontario, Canada. She attended the University of Western Ontario, where she studied journalism and English, but left the school after only two years when she married first husband James Munro (m. 1951–1972); the couple moved to Victoria, Vancouver, British Columbia, where they opened a bookstore. Also during this time, Munro began publishing her work in various magazines.
Munro’s first collection of stories (and first book-length work) was published in 1968 as Dance of the Happy Shades; the collection achieved great success in Munro’s native country, including her first Governor General’s Award for fiction. Three years later, she published Lives of Girls and Women, a collection of stories.
Primarily known for her short stories about life in Ontario, Munro has published several collections over the past several decades, including Who Do You Think You Are? (1978); The Moons of Jupiter (1982); Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), which was later adapted into a film, Away from Her, directed by Sarah Polley and released in 2006; Runaway (2004); and The View from Castle Rock (2006).
Munro received her second Governor award exactly three decades after her first, in 1998, for The Progress of Love. In 2005, TIME magazine named Munro a TIME 100 Honoree. «Alice Munro is 73 now, and she deserves the Nobel Prize,» TIME wrote. «Her fiction admits readers to a more intimate knowledge and respect for what they already possess.»
In 2009, Munro won the Man Booker International Prize, honoring her lifetime body of work. That same year, she published the short-story collection Too Much Happiness.
Munro would go on to publish 13 short-story collections by her 80th birthday. Most recently, in 2012, she published Dear Life—her final story collection, according to the writer, who announced that she was retiring from writing in June 2013.
In October 2013, at the age of 82, Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, with the Swedish Academy lauding her as the «master of the contemporary short story.» Munro is the first Canadian woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The structure of the work consists of the introductory, two chapters, the conclusion and bibliography.

Заключение:

Negation is a universal category of language common to all languages of the world. In linguistics, negation is an expression by means of lexical, morphological, syntactic and other means. In English negation in the sentence may be expressed in subject, predicate or any other pert of speech, but there should be only one negation in an English sentence. But in spoken English this rule can be broken, “ain’t” functions as the negative form of both present tense “be” and present tense “have” in non-standard English today.
We can do the following conclusions:
There are a lot of means to express negation. The most important element of negation in the English language is the particle not. It should be put after the auxiliary or modal verb. But there are a lot of other ways, negative adverbs, negative pronouns, and negative preposition “without”. There are also a lot of negative prefixes in English.
Double negation is sometimes used in the English language. But there are no examples in the analyzed work of Alice Munro, so we may conclude that double-negation sentences are considered to be grammatically incorrect in modern English.
A non-standard form of “ain’t” can be often used in modern spoken English, but it’s still hardly even found in literature. There are no examples of this form of negation in the analyzed work of Alice Munro.
Constructions with negation are a more complex, indirect, sophisticated way of expression, so they are a kind of stylistic device.
As a stylistic means, they are related to such figures of speech as periphrasis. As a less categorical form of expression in relation to the corresponding semantically positive turnover, the negative construction can serve as a means to soften the statement. There are also grounds to speak about a certain tendency to actively use negative turns of speech in the fiction, in which the rhetorical and artistic function of negation is embodied. But negative adverbs must be much less common in spoken language, because there is no need to be indirect or sophisticated in spoken language.

Фрагмент текста работы:

1. Category of negation in linguistic
1.1 Category of negation in language
Negation is a universal category common to all languages of the world. From the point of view of simple statements negation is involved in selecting certain forms of categorical statements such as general negative and particular negative as opposed to general affirmative and particular affirmative respectively. In complex statements negation is used, or may be used in the function «it is not true that» applied to the statement.
The category of negation reflects the relationships of subjects of objective world namely the process of denial of some statements. There exists a simple relationship between any statement and the negation of this statement: if one is true, the other is false, if one is false, the other is true. In other words, any statement in the objective world has its opposite (or contradictory) value.
Many scientists made attempts to understand the nature of linguistic negation. It originated from a desperate endeavor to give a coherent account of multiple negative phrases encountered in different periods of the history of English.
At different stages of the development of Russian linguistics, certain properties of negation as objects of linguistics were brought to the fore. Thus, the category of negation is covered in the works of L. V. Azarova and I. V. Andreeva, who understand negation as a grammatical phenomenon that has its own specifics depending on the sphere of communication, and the stylistic possibilities of this category. Questions related to the peculiarities of the functioning of negation in different styles of speech, also studied I.V. Andreeva [2].
The well-known Russian linguist A.M. Peshkovsky noted that «the essence of this category, which has a tremendous psychological and, mainly, logical significance (because the statement and negation mutually determine each other), and where there is no statement, there is no truth, there is no human thought» [4, p. 8].
Quite a detailed description of the negation we find in the work of the famous linguist O. Espersen «Philosophy of grammar», which considers this category from the standpoint of logic. From his point of view, the basis of the linguistic understanding of negation is the philosophical and logical category of negation. The proximity of logical and linguistic understanding of negation is explained by the recognition that negation is one of the fundamental operations of human thinking reflected in language [4, p. 9].
In the course of several years’ work on particular aspects of generative grammar a number of theoretically important points emerged. They all have found their full consideration in «Aspects of Theory of Syntax» (1965), written by Noam Chomsky which marks a new period in the history of transformation in grammar. It was agreed that transformations must be meaning preserving, cannot delete elements unrecoverably, some ordering of transformations should be observed. Most of the singularly transformations postulated previously as optional «must be reformulated as obligatory transformations whose applicability to a string is determined by presence or absence of a certain marker in the string» [5, p. 132].
Any sentences in English – narrative, interrogative, imperative – can be both affirmative and negative. The division of sentences into affirmative (positive) and negative is based on connections between objects and their features in the real world, which are expressed through syntactic connections between sentence members. For example, there can be a cat in the room, but there can be no room for cat in the small apartment.
First of all, we should pay attention to the differences in the construction of negative sentences in Russian and in English. As we know, in the Russian language, double and even triple negations are the norm, and the very concept of «double negation» is not new and unfamiliar for the Russian-speaking person something, while in the English language, as a rule, only one negation is used.
F.E.:
Ни один из вас не будет смотреть телевизор.
None of you will watch TV.
As a rule, any English sentence has only one negation:
Ни одна из моих открыток не дошла.
None of my postcards has arrived.
«ни одна… не дошла» = «none»
Она ничего не делает!
She does nothing!
«ничего…не…» = «nothing»
Он никогда не улыбается.
He never smiles.
«никогда не…» = «never»
The words nobody, nothing, never, etc. are enough to convey a negative meaning in the English language, and the particle is not required (despite the fact that in Russian negation can often be double).
They never visit us
I opened the door, but I could see nobody.
Nobody, nothing, never, etc. are more expressive forms than not anybody, not anything, not ever, etc. Note that anybody, anything, ever, etc. are not negative words – to become such, they must be used together with the negative particle not.
I opened the door, but I couldn’t see anybody.
I haven’t thought of anything.
I didn’t buy anything.
But double negation is sometimes still used in the English language. Despite the above, it is not uncommon for informal English to have double-negation sentences to reinforce negation.
F.E.:
I don’t want to go nowhere.
I’m not going to do no homework today.
I don’t like no sugar.
However, such forms are considered to be grammatically incorrect and their use is not recommended.
In very rare cases one can find forms with triple negation, to particularly strong effect of the negation. In such cases, a non-standard form of ain’t can be often used, which is a contraction of the forms am not, are not, is not, have not, or has not.
Forms with triple negation can also lead to grammatically correct forms by replacing all unnecessary negative words with positive words within the meaning, and replacing the word ain’t with an appropriate form.
F.E.:
I ain’t never going to do no homework. = I am not ever going to do any homework. I’ll never do any homework.
I ain’t going to take nothing from nobody. = I am not going to take anything from anybody. I’ll never take anything from anyone.
You ain’t never going to go to go nowhere with me if you act like that. = You aren’t ever going to go anywhere with me if you act like that. You’re never going anywhere with me if you act like this.
Ain’t is perhaps the best known shibboleth of non-standard English, and this already implies that it is highly stigmatized. Ain’t is a negative form of unclear historical origin and of very wide usage, both grammatically and geographically. Probably due to a historical coincidence, ain’t functions as the negative form of both present tense BE and present tense HAVE in non-standard English today [1, p. 112].
Negative sentences are divided into several types. A common negation is a sentence with a predication negation.
F.E.:
He didn’t think my part was very good (W. S. Maugham).
This did not prevent Julia from falling madly in love with him (W. S. Maugham).
Oh, but Helen isn’t a girl without no interests, she explained (E. M. Forster).
But of course the negation can refer to any member of a sentence other than a predicate.
Not a person could be seen around.
I could trust on no one in this matter (A. Christie).
Negative sentences are also found in complex sentences, both compound and complex sentences.
F.E.:
His ear was so perfect, and though he could not produce the right intonation himself he would never let a false one pass in anyone else (W. S. Maugham).
In addition, a combination of negation in the main sentence and negation in the verbal phrase is possible in one sentence.
Negation can be expressed in infinitive, gerundial, and participial constructions.
F.E.:
Would it not be better not to tell your father? (J. London).
The category of negation finds its philosophical definition in the law of negation of negation. This law reflects the objective interconnection between what is negated and what negates. This process takes place objectively as dialectical negation of the elements of old and affirmation of the elements of new. It means that in all new manifestations of the old exist, but in the transformed form.
There are some common features of negation in philosophy and logics. The category of negation in logics is manifested in the law of contradiction. This law states that two contradictory statements cannot be true, at least one of them is false. The law of contradiction doesn’t deal with the problem of which of the two statements is false. This problem is solved in actual practice. The law states that only that in two statements one of which negates the other one, one is obligatory false.
Whether the other statement is true or false is not stated in the law. It can be either false or true.
So, the truth of one of the contradictory statements enables us to recognize the other one is false, because they cannot be both true at one and the same time, and in one and the same space. But the recognition of one of the contradictory statements to be false doesn’t obligatory mean that the other one is true.
The law of contradiction as any other law of formal logics can be applied only to statements that deal with one and the same object, one and the same time and space. In case the statements deal with different objects or different features of one and the same object those statements are not contradictory and consequently the law of contradiction cannot be applied to them.
The law of contradiction reflects the quantitative definiteness of objects; it states the fact that if an object possesses a quality; this very object is not unable to possess it.
It cannot happen in actual reality that an object can at the same time possess or not possess any quality. That is why if the definition of any quality is correct, the negation of this quality cannot be correct at the same time by any means.
These common features of the category of negation in philosophy and logics clarify the semantics of negation on the one hand, but on the other hand, they make it more entangled and necessitate the research of this category.
It is known from the cultural literature that in some cultures negative forms are used much less than in others, and this is associated with the national habit of trying never to give a negative answer directly, but on the contrary, to express refusal indirectly and veiled.
«Understatement» is a phenomenon that is difficult to learn. For an Englishman this phenomenon is quite natural, as it is woven into his culture and is part of his psychology. The child learns English as early as in childhood, gradually learning it in the process of their cultural and linguistic development.
In this custom of not speaking directly and frankly we can assume that the speech of the Englishman seems amorphous and undefined.
However, this phenomenon is present in English fiction, without detracting from its merits. Due to these features of the scientific style, the author rarely expresses his subjective attitude to the statement. As a rule, it conveys the attitude of an indeterminate person or group of persons, or the attitude of another author to whom it refers.
All statements are made in the indicative mood, but to express the probability, doubt, restraint statements used subjunctive and modal verbs, which make up the largest group.
It is necessary to pay attention to some interesting lexical means, mitigating categorical statements in the scientific article. In the scientific article used the adjectives possible, doubtful, etc., and in attributive function (possible way, doubtful data, etc.), and compound nominal predicate (it is possible, it is impossible, etc.).
Even for such a phrase as “it is necessary”, which does not soften the categorical statement, the author of the scientific article finds the means by which it gives a more restrained, non-categorical character of the statement.
F.E.:
However it is not strictly necessary to assume a vertical liquid velocity (Annals of Nuclear Energy).
In conclusion, we can suggest, that the negation is quite complex phenomena. It is not simply linguistic but cultural and psychological as well. The removal of categorical statements is characteristic feature of the modern English language, as well as indirect phrases with different means to express the negation amorphous and softly. But ways of expressing negation is more broadly are discussed in next paragraph of the study.