THE PRIORITY IN USING NEGATIVE FORM OF THE POTENTIAL STRUCTURES IN CHINESE AND VIETNAMESE

Abstract

: Nowadays, in almost every natural languages, there’s an objective existence of the “potential category” and the syntactic structures that express this category (also called “potential structures”). Among these potential structures in Chinese, the potential complement structure “Vde/bu C” is an unique one. In Vietnamese, we can put the adverbs “duoc”, “noi” and “xue” behind the main verb to express possibility. In this paper, we temporarily denoted structures that use these adverbs as “(khong) V+M” (with M stands for “duoc”, “noi”, “xue”). In practical language, both of those two structures show that they have the priority of being used in their negative form. This paper focuses on the description of the specific performance of this trend, morever we will make the preliminarily explanation for the root of this phenomenon.