Negative future when using 要

[Christa]

Hi everyone,

 

I've recently had two different native Chinese speakers tell me different things about how to negate 要 when talking about the future in Chinese.

I believe that this difference is regional issue and could not get them to agree (in fact, they strongly disagreed with each other) about it.

 

Their disagreement was as follows:

 

When discussing the correct way to negate 要 when using it to talk about the future, I used the following positive example:

 

明年我要去香港

 

They each told me a different way to turn this negative.

 

The first native speaker's method was to say the following:

 

明年我没有要去香港

 

The second native speaker said that that was wrong and that, instead, you could only say:

 

明年我不去香港

 

Which of these is correct in standard Mandarin? It doesn't seem like it can be both because the second native speaker said the first method was actually wrong. But the first native speaker was emphatic that this was how they always made a future sentence with 要 negative.

 

So, which is considered standard / correct / widespread?

 

Thanks,

 

 

Christina

[somethingfunny]

Interesting question!

 

My instinct is to say that it depends on how you interpret 明年我要去香港.

 

1. "Next year I want/would like to go to Hong Kong" would be negated as "Next year I do not want to go to Hong Kong", so I would go with 明年我不要去香港.  Here 要 is performing the same function as 想 or 想要 would.

2. "Next year I will/plan to go to Hong Kong" would be negated as "Next year I will not/am not planning to go to Hong Kong", so I would go with 明年我不去香港.  Here 要 is performing the same function as 打算.

 

I would say that the second point would be the most common way of expressing this, as any ambiguity in the first one could be cleared up using 想.

 

So, as for 没有要去, I feel like this is a 'non-standard' response, which I would liken more to something along the lines of "I never said I wanted to go to Hong Kong next year".

 

[Publius]

明年我不去香港 ✔

明年我没有要去香港 ✘ or non-standard. Looks like there's some L1 interference (probably from Cantonese). The same speaker may also use 明年我有要去香港, which is also non-standard.

[Christa]

What fascinating answers. Thank you so much.

 

Interestingly, the non-standard one comes from someone from southern China so that makes sense!

[歐博思]

I can picture 明年我没有要去香港 as a sassy rebuttal in a Taiwanese drama, which btw their Mandarin is also southern.

[Publius]

Well, not all Chinese (or Han Chinese for that matter) are native Mandarin speakers. Take Taiwan for example. The language with the most native speakers there is Taiwanese Hokkien 臺灣閩南話 (70% of population), followed by Hakka 客家話 (15% of population). Standard Mandarin or 國語 is the official language and as a lingua franca is spoken by all groups including aborigines (whose native languages aren't even Sino-Tibetan), but only 12% of the population are native Mandarin speakers (mainly those who fled mainland in 1949 and their descendants). (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Taiwan)

Guoyu taught in Taiwan isn't that much different from Putonghua taught in northern China. For example, there are ㄓ(zh)ㄔ(ch)ㄕ(sh) and there are ㄗ(z)ㄘ(c)ㄙ(s). Everybody knows which is which or you won't be able to type (or graduate). But watch 10 minutes of TV programs produced in Taiwan and you'll notice they don't pronounce zh/ch/sh the way they're supposed to, because of the influence of their first languages. Standards, after all, are just standards.

A parallel with the linguistic situation in India: English is an official language of India, but an Indian person does not automatically qualify as a native English speaker.

To complicate matters further, native Chinese speaker ≠ native Mandarin speaker. There are many Chinese languages.

[imron]

11 hours ago, Christa said:

which is considered standard / correct / widespread?

I'll give you the same response I gave in one of your other posts, which standard and which region?

[Christa]

7 hours ago, imron said:

I'll give you the same response I gave in one of your other posts, which standard and which region?

 

I take your point and what I'd say in response is: whichever standard and region you have any knowledge of.

 

So, if you know what is considered standard according to the P.R.O.C. government then that is useful to hear about. If you know what is standard according to the R.O.C. government then that is also useful to hear about. And if, according to your knowledge, something in the south of China is considered acceptable but in the north it is not then that is also useful to hear about. It's these kinds of regional / official differences that I'm trying to get to grips with because I'm often being told "you can't say it that way" by one person and then being told the opposite from another. It's very useful to know why this is happening because it lets me to know when I'm actually getting something wrong (when I'm saying something that isn't acceptable anywhere) and when I'm simply encountering a regional variation.

 

That's why I'm asking what you believe to be considered standard / correct / widespread. I can't tell you how useful this information is when trying to work out which parts of my Chinese I need to adjust and which parts I don't - and I can't say how grateful I am for the advice that's been given! 

[Flickserve]

1 hour ago, Christa said:

I can't tell you how useful this information is when trying to work out which parts of my Chinese I need to adjust and which parts I don't - and I can't say how grateful I am for the advice that's been given!

 

This is a good thread.!