Negative Marker bu in Chinese: its Nature and Features

The purpose of this paper is to account in a generalized way for two facts about negation in Chinese. One is that the Chinese negative marker bu cannot co-occur with the perfective aspect marker le; the other is that the Chinese negative marker bu is incompatible with the manner phrase in the V-de construction. We claim that the functional category NegP postulated by Pollock (1989) can be extended to Chinese and that NegP analysis can account better for the syntactic distribution of the Chinese negative marker bu. The negative marker bu is placed in the specifier of NegP, while the head of NegP is left empty; and the complement of NegP is usually an AspP, which is headed by an Aspect marker, or an AUXP when there is an auxiliary occupying AUX. Chinese is an Asp-lowering language. Its perfective aspect marker le is lowered from Asp onto V, and the trace left behind in the Asp node by the moved head should be properly head governed. This can be satisfied when there are auxiliary verbs, but when there are no auxiliary verbs, (because the head of NegP is empty) nothing properly head governs the trace, an ECP violation will arise. Since the postverbal adjunct marker -de originated from the Asp of AspP, the incompatibility between bu and the manner phrase in the V-de construction can also be explained.