Ambiguity in the Negative V+bo NP Construction in Taiwanese Southern Min

Ambiguity in the Negative V+bo NP Construction in Taiwanese Southern Min* Huang, Hui-yu Graduate Institute of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, National Chiao Tung University, 1001 Ta-Hsueh Road, Hsinchu, Taiwan s1104029@Gmail.com Abstract. This paper examines some syntactic and semantic properties of the negative construction V+bo NP (VbN) in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). It finds out that there are ambiguities between an episode reading and a generic reading in VbN construction which require further investigations and explanations. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to account for the ambiguities lying in the negative VbN construction. Keywords: negative markers, Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM), ambiguity. 1. Introduction The V+bo NP is a special negative construction in TSM whose exact syntactic counterpart is not found in Mandarin Chinese. It has been widely acknowledged that the post-verbal negative marker bo ‘not’ in the VbN may form a resultative complement with the preceding verb (e.g. Cheng 1997; Li 1996; Teng 1992). While those works have shed light on the semantic characteristics of bo, the VbN construction remains ambiguous between an episode and a generic reading that each needs to be explained. On the episode reading, bo expresses the lack of a desired result such as (1). Sentence (1) means that the agent he intended to find someone, so he did the finding-event, but failed to find out the person. On the generic reading, the VbN is taken as an association with a potential property, as in (2). It expresses that the agent he does not have the ability to do the studying-event well. (1) I chue bo lang. he find not person ‘He failed in finding the person.’ (2) I thak bo chhe. he study not book ‘He can not study well.’ The main goal of this paper is to argue that the different interpretations of VbN construction in Taiwanese Southern Min may be due to different structural positions which the post-verbal negative marker bo occupies on the ground of Zanuttini’s (1997) proposal that argues for there to be different structural positions for two kinds of post-verbal negative markers, namely presuppositional versus non-presuppositional, as stated in (3). * This article began as a term paper for my first-year syntax seminar course. I am grateful to C.-S. Luther Liu for his comments of that paper. I am also appreciative of P.-Y. Katherine Hsiao’s discussions with me. The author is responsible for all the mistakes in the article and understands further modifications are required in the future. Copyright 2007 by Hui-yu Huang 163 (3) a. Presuppositional negative markers, which negate a proposition that is assumed in the discourse. b. Non-presuppositional negative markers, which negate a proposition that does not have a special discourse status. (Zanuttini 1997: 99) More precisely, bo in the episode reading context corresponds to the presuppositional negative marker whereas bo in the generic reading context corresponds to the non-presuppositional negative marker. The remaining sections of this article is organized as follows. Section 2 is a summary of Zanuttini’s (1997) analysis of post-verbal negative markers. Section 3 …

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