Beyond negation—the roles of meiyou and bushi in Mandarin conversation

This paper focuses on the negative markers meiyou and bushi (meaning ‘not/no’) in Mandarin conversation and, in particular, on their idiosyncratic use in spoken discourse. In this study, through close observation of actual conversation, I found that meiyou and bushi serve more functions than simply that of a response token ‘no’ to a question, and I identified their extra linguistic functions beyond negation. I explored their function in the light of Halliday’s [Halliday, M.A.K., 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold, London] theory of three metafunctions of language, viz. the propositional, textual, and interpersonal functions. Cognitive and social principles, that is, Sperber and Wilson’s [Sperber, Dan, Wilson, Deirdre, 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford] theory of relevance and Brown and Levinson’s [Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C., 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge University Press] politeness principle were applied as well, particularly to the textual and interpersonal functions. In particular, I observed from my data that, in Taiwan, Mandarin meiyou tends to be used to preface non-agreement and bushi, disagreement. Both of them are markers of a dispreferred second part in the adjacency relationship. This study suggests that bushi is basically a monosemous marker of denial; it retains the meaning of negation, conveys explicit negation in interaction, and encodes the speaker’s attitudes toward the communicative world of the speech event; i.e., it is less referential (that is, focusing on the referential content of the message) and more expressive/subjective (that is, focusing on the speaker’s beliefs or attitudes toward the event). Meiyou, on the other hand, is polysemous and is undergoing grammaticalization through the semantic–pragmatic recruitment of both subjectivity (to express and regulate beliefs, attitudes, etc.) and intersubjectivity (to make explicit the speaker’s attitude to what is being said).