Abstract
This study investigates the syntactic features and the uses of English and Vietnamese negative sentences. This is a descriptive study executed in a contrastive analysis with English chosen as the source language and Vietnamese as the target language. First, we describe major syntactic features and the uses of negative sentences in English and Vietnamese. Then, we draw out some similarities and differences of the two languages in terms of their syntactic features and uses. Based on these findings, implications about syntactic features and the uses of negative sentences in English and Vietnamese have been proposed to the Vietnamese learners of English for the purpose of understanding communicative significance of negative sentences.