The Chinese negation marker bu and its association with focus

The Chinese negation market- bu 'not' is analyzed as a clitic-like element in the literature (Huang 1988; Ernst 1995; etc.) in order to explain why it cannot co-occur with (i) the perfective marker -le or (ii) manner phrases in the V-de construction. Huang (1988) assumes that bu must cliticize onto auxiliaries/modals or the following verb, and since bu cliticizing directly, to a verb induces a "nonevent" that is semantically incompatible with -le and manner phrases, facts (i) and (ii) are thus accounted for. Grammatical sentences without auxiliaries/modals are assumed to have an empty modal with future or volitional meaning, giving bu the meaning won't. Unlike Huang, Ernst (1995) argues that bu is proclitic on the adjacent word. He explains facts (i) and (ii), respectively, by the boundedness conflict between bu, assumed to occur only with unbounded situations, and perfective -le that requires bounded situations, and by assuming that the XP trace of a manner phrase between bu and the verb prevents bu fi-om cliticizing to any lexical element, leading to ungrammatical sentences. However, closer examination shows that bu can co-occur with both manner phrases in the V-de construction and perfective -le. In this paper ive argue that bu is not a clitic-like element and claim that it is a focus-sensitive operator. We propose an interpretation condition (IC) for bu that says that bu induces a tripartite structure if there is a focus to its right; otherwise it negates the adjacent word By appealing to scope interaction, IC, and the assumption that perfective -le has a clausal scope (Pan 1993; Lin 1999), we can explain facts (i) and (ii) better than Huang (1988) and Ernst (1995).