| Existential constructions (henceforth EC) in modern Chinese have been a subject of intense academic debate, which are much concerned with elements in Part A, verbs in Part B and definiteness in Part C respectively. Compared with studies of Part B and Part C in EC, studies of Part A remains much disputed, the core problems of which can be summarized as issues of argument and non-argument attributives of elements in Part A. That is to say, there are elements with argumental attributes projected and licensed by verbs, like "zhuozishang fang le yipen hua"(On the table was put a potted flowers), as well those with non-argumental attibutes, like "cunzaili si le yige ren"(In the village died a person). The remained puzzles are:how to license non-argument elements syntactically in Part A? What are their syntactic status?To solve the issues above, scholars aboard adopt different frameworks like light verb theory or event structure theory to tackle how to introduce non-argument elements in Part A. These solutions confront problems of formal motivation as well as universality, in other words, why are these solutions only adaptable to Chinese, but not English? Scholars at home focus much on the range of Part A and their syntactic status. For example, can time be treated as elements in Part A? Are these elements subject, object or topic?All in all, the previous studies are much of qualitative researches, lack of quantitative researches. Meanwhile, studies within qualitative methods remain deficits: either confined them to Chinese itself or rely too much on Indo-European languages, ignoring the fact that languages are diversified. Considering current situations and remained issues, this dissertation, to maximize the pursuit of universality and particularity among languages, will adopt the paradigm of qualitative/quantitative methods as well as typology/formal syntax. It also resors to corpus linguitics to meet descriptive adequacy and explanatory adequacy in the study of elements in Part A and their syntactic status.This dissertation contributes to classification of EC in mandarin Chinese, description of argument and non-argument elements in Part A, their syntactic licensing and status, which are illustrated as follows:(1) Depending on properties of "you"(have), this study makes sense the concepts of entity EC and event EC in Chinese. Relying on "zai"(on), we propose four kinds of EC:"you"EC, static locative entity EC, dymatic directional event EC and static locative event EC, building the continumm system between entity EC and event EC. The elements of Part A in the first three kinds are arguments for its relation to "zai" prepositional phrase, the elements of Part A in the last one are non-arguments for its no relation to "zai" prepositional phrase.(2) According to be in English and "you" in Chinese, as well as their typological differences when employed as aspectual markers, this study delves into the syntactic licensing of non-argument in Part A. The result witness that the choice of aspectual markers determine the possibility of non-argument in Part A of Chinese and the impossibility of non-argument in Part A of English. The research also indicates that the syntactic status of Part A are not related to arguments and non-arguments, but to their wors class:PPs in Part A are topics, aspectual elements in Part A are subjects. Time in Part A can only be topics for its syntactic behaviours, which id further supported by other languages.(3) Abstracting the corpus with 4861375 characters, we build a sampling corpus with 4255 EC sentences. According to the statistics, there are 3548 tokens of arguments in Part A, with 645 in "you" EC,1988 in static entity EC,592 in dynamic event EC and 293 in "shi" EC. There are 707 tokens of arguments in Part A. The percentage between arguments and non-arguments in Part A is 83.4:16.6. This result indicates the markedness of non-argument and unmarkedness of arguments in Part A.This also tells that ECs tend to be universal and the markedness from universality indicates its particularities.This study is significant in typology linguistics and general linguistics. On one hand, analysis of "you" provides motivation in previous studies and deepen our understanding of argument and non-argument, it also provides explanation for the motivation of non-argument introducing and makes clear the syntactic status of elements in Part A, which is further supported by cross language data; on the other hand, this study, depending on existential be and possessive you(have), tentatively explores the interaction between and aspect and predicate cross linguistically, deeping the researches on existential and possessive sentences, providing a theoretical framework for the study of grammatical functions like subject.This study also bears some application values. Researches on arguments/non-arguments help explain the theoretical and empirical puzzles, which benefits Chinese teaching, natural language processing and teaching Chinese as a foreign language. |
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