Quelques aspects de la négation en vietnamien

The Vietnamese borrowed the Chinese word kông 'empty, void' to be used as a negative particle some four centuries ago. Chang, the negative particle of Vietnamese origin stayed predominant until the 19th century but is now almost replaced by Ž transcribed as không in Vietnamese. Why such a borrowing and replacement? My paper tries to answer this question by examining: a) the difference between two types of negation, the negation of truth vs the negation of existence; b) the relationship between quantification and negation. Marie-Claude PARIS Syntactic position and information value in Mandarin Chinese : the Han ... ye/dou construction In this paper I argue that there is no one-to-one relationship between syntactic position and informational value in Mandarin Chinese. To my mind the Han ... ye/dou construction carries new information. Hence Tsao's analysis (1990) of Han ... ye/dou as a topic marker is rejected. WaltraudPAUL Does verb gapping exist in Chinese ? This paper refutes Li Meidu's (1988) claim that verb gapping is allowed in Mandarin Chinese. Apparent examples of verb gapping in the second conjunct of coordinate structures: NP V NP, NP NP are shown to involve a topic - comment structure rather than a subject - object structure with a verb deletion in between. Alain PEYRAUBE New reflections on the history of the disposal forms in Chinese The disposal form is probably the most studied construction so far, either in synchrony or in diachrony. However, the problem of the origin of this form is still debated. The classical hypothesis on the origin of the disposal form is the following: В A (mainly jiang and ba) were verbs in Archaic Chinese; used in VI position in serial verb constructions of the type "VI + О + V2" since early medieval, they were grammaticalized and became prepositions some time between the 7th and 9th centuries. This classical analysis has been challenged recently in several ways. First of ally jiang and ba could come directly from yi - through an analogous process - by a single lexical replacement, without it being necessary to speak of any grammaticalization. The disposal forms could also come from subject-patient sentences to which one could add jiang or ba. This paper discusses these new hypotheses and concludes: 1) that the hypothesis of an analogous phenomenon with yi, which might have served as a model to jiang and ba, is worth maintaining; 2) that the hypothesis whereby the disposal sentences could have come from patient-subject sentences to which г. jiang 370Nguyên Phu Phong. Quelques aspects de la négation en vietnamien. In: Cahiers de linguistique - Asie orientale, vol. 23, 1994. pp. 231-239