Negative existentials and presentationals in Chinese

This study investigates the translation strategies for the negated counterparts of yǒu rén ‘there is someone, there are people’ in a parallel corpus composed of Chinese-to-English aligned narrative texts. It specifically explores the distinction between existentials and presentationals in negative contexts. The analysis shows that negative existentials convey human absence in a given location, with the English translation often thematizing the location and implicitizing the human entity to varying degrees. The study contributes to the debate on whether presentationals can be negated, arguing that while negative presentationals do not introduce discourse referents, they express the occurrence of nonevents tied to spatiotemporal coordinates just like events. These sentences often establish Set-Member relationships with discourse-old groups, visible in English translations through partitive nouns (e.g., none, no one of them) or referring expressions referencing the Set (e.g., they, everyone). In other instances, negative presentationals convey counterexpectational meaning, indicating the non-occurrence of an expected event. In all cases, negative presentationals are thus strongly tied to the cotext and cannot be uttered “out of the blue”