The present article demonstrates how the so far unchallenged misanalysis within Chinese linguistics of a few, but central, data points has led to a distorted picture biasing, inter alia, the general typology of wh-in-situ languages as well as the crosslinguistic study of Quantifier Phrases. This is the case for méi yǒu rén ‘not exist person’, hěnshǎo yǒu rén ‘rarely exist person’, and zhǐ yǒu DP ‘only exist DP’, which are not nominal projections equivalent of ‘nobody’, ‘only DP’, and ‘few people’ as currently assumed, but existential constructions: ‘there isn't anybody’, ‘there is only DP’, and ‘there are rarely people’. In addition, a subset of speakers has reanalyzed hěnshǎo (yǒu) rén with a covert yǒu ‘exist’ as a QP hěnshǎo rén ‘few people’. A corpus study highlights the limited distribution of hěnshǎo rén ‘few people’, which shows that it is not on a par with its antonym hěn duō rén ‘many people’.

This article investigates the postverbal negation construction in Taiwanese Southern Min. I propose that the construction is derived in a way similar to resultatives and that the postverbal negation bo and its affirmative counterpart u are particular kinds of aspectual elements in the resultative complement. Given this, the lack of (apparent) postverbal negation in the closely-related language Mandarin Chinese can be ascribed to the fact that Mandarin Chinese lacks this particular aspectual use of affirmative you and negative mei(you) and thus it fails to generate the structure under investigation. It is also shown that the proposed analysis is supported by cross-linguistic correlations among Chinese languages.