A Typological Study Of English And Chinese Existential/Presentational Sentences

Existential/Presentational (E/P) sentences express the meaning of "In someplace exists, presents or disappears some one or something". In all human languages that we have known, there is the category of "existence/presentation", so E/P sentences are universal and they are also focus of linguists’attention at home and abroad. Many scholars have studied English and Chinese E/P sentences from the perspectives of Traditional Grammar, Transformational-Generative Grammar, Systematic-Functional Grammar and Cognitive Grammar, in which the studies of English E/P sentence mainly focus on issues like the origin of there, what is the real subject of English E/P sentences, the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic functions of English E/P sentences and so on; while the studies of Chinese E/P sentences focus on the classification, the semantic and the pragmatic functions and so forth. These studies are great achievements, but they are seldom concerned with the study from the typological perspective. Linguistic Typology is a research approach or a theoretical framework in linguistic study. Modern Typology sprouts from the Prague School’s study of markedness in phonetic system in concrete languages, and its establishment is in the1960s, marked by the proposal of Greenberg’s implicational universals of word order. Modern Typology has been greatly developed on the basis of the traditional typology, and its research focus is no longer the linguistic classification, but is turned to the study of cross-linguistic comparison to reflect linguistic universals.This thesis tries to make a typological study of English and Chinese E/P sentences to find out their typological properties. Theoretically, the thesis is conducted from the typological perspective with the theoretical frameworks of Figure-Ground Theory and Prototype Theory. Methodologically, the thesis is conducted by means of an integration of description and explanation as well as data analysis, to make a cross-linguistic study of E/P sentences. A sample chamber is set up for this study, and it includes42languages, touching upon three language types, that is, SVO, SOV and VSO, in which the English material consists of419090words and29345sentences including954E/P sentences, and the Chinese material consists of2413056words and79874sentences including1912E/P sentences.This thesis studies English and Chinese E/P sentences mainly from three aspects. First is the study of word order. In a language type, the word orders of L, P and E are generally corresponding with the word orders of S, V and O; the word orders of P and V are harmonic; the LE is the dominant word order of L and E. Second is the study of E/P componential co-existence. In some communications, some E/P components are hidden. Therefore, it is meaningful to study the co-existence of E/P components. There are four types of E/P componential co-existence in the sample chamber, namely, L/P/E, P/E, L/E and E. Third is the study of grammatical hierarchies in English and Chinese E/P sentences. The thesis points out three grammatical hierarchies of E/P sentences, namely,1) the grammatical hierarchy of componential co-existence:L/P/E> P/E> L/E> E;2) the grammatical hierarchy of E/P verbs:intransitive> transitive> null> suffix of past participle, and in English and Chinese E/P sentences, the E/P verb grammatical hierarchy is intransitive>transitive>null; and3) the grammatical hierarchy of E/P entity’s definiteness:specific> nonspecific> definite.Language is the external representation of the inner world of human being, and there is a close relationship between linguistic patterns and human cognitive modes, and many linguistic phenomena can be explained by human cognitive thinking. So this thesis explains the typological properties of English and Chinese E/P sentences from the cognitive perspective, on the theoretical foundations of Figure-Ground Theory and Prototype Theory. Through this study, language learners and users can know more about the typological properties of English and Chinese E/P sentences. Moreover, to a certain extent, the study also theoretically and practically supports the bilingual teaching, the foreign language teaching, the second language acquisition and the translations between English and Chinese.