Historically speaking, the prepositional construction(PC) originated from the serial verb construction (SVC) in mandarin Chinese. When the negative prepositional construction (Neg PC) is the form S+Neg+PP+VP and the negative serial verb construction (...
Historically speaking, the prepositional construction(PC) originated from the serial verb construction (SVC) in mandarin Chinese. When the negative prepositional construction (Neg PC) is the form S+Neg+PP+VP and the negative serial verb construction (Neg SVC) is the form bu VP1 VP2 ,the unmarked negative focus of the Neg PC may be PP or VP, and the unmarked negative focus of the Neg SVC is VP1. When the Neg PC is the form S+PP+Neg+VP, and the Neg SVC is VP1 bu VP2, the unmarked negative focus of both of them are VP and VP2, respectively. The position of bu in S+PP+VP is decided by the different prepositions, and bu can occur before VP1 or VP2 in S+VP1+VP2. The two differences of the Neg PC and the Neg SVC are attributed to the degree of the adjacency principle of negative focus and the close structure of PP+VP and the loose structure of VP1+VP2. In this paper we prove that word order has a great influence on the unmarked negative focus in mandarin Chinese, and that the unmarked negative focus of the Neg PC and the Neg SVC has its inherent regularity, respectively.