Double negative?

trevorb
 February 01, 2008, 07:26 PM posted in General Discussion

 

Does mandarin have the concept of a double negative?

I was listening to the stingy boss lesson and the term cónglái bùqǐng (从来不清）came up and another example of was given of having never been to china that used cónglái méiyǒu.

I translated that as "never not treat" and "never not have" but the actual meaing was the exact opposite of that translation.  Is this due to the use of cónglái or is there some grammar thing I'm not getting here?  I think this is the only time I've encountred this but I fell into it both listening to the lessson and reading the hanzi so I need to figure this one out :-)

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xiaohu
 February 01, 2008, 08:54 PM

trevorb: Yes Mandarin does have the concept of double negative, which actually has been covered in quite a few lessons.

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xiaohu
 February 01, 2008, 09:05 PM

Sorry, my post wasn't over, I was trying to look for some of those lessons and must have accidentally updated this window, I'll find some examples to post here.

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trevorb
 February 02, 2008, 06:19 PM

Ta xiaohu.... I've only recently moved onto elementary so could have missed some previously...

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wei1xiao4
 February 13, 2008, 09:35 AM

Trevorb, I'm certainly no expert. But from what I am learning, there are certain adverbs that always occur in "negation". Cong2lai2 is one of those words. Others listed in my book are gen1ben3 (absolutely) and bing (absolutely). They are both followed by a negative to mean "absolutely not". Cong2lai2 actually requires the negative to follow it in order to make it mean "never". Does that make sense?