A Computational Cognitive Study Of English Existential Sentences

The English existential sentence,as a common sentence structure,is a research hot spot of various linguistic schools.The study is mostly limited to descriptive explanations of its structure and the conversion of its synonymous sentence structures.There are minor relevant quantitative studies,and they have not involved the selection process and reason analysis of English existential sentences and their synonymous sentence structures.Researchers of Computational Cognitive Science believe that the use of experience determines the comprehension difficulty,and the comprehension difficulty is limited by working memory.They put forward the mean dependent distance(MDD),amount of information(AI)and redundancy and other Computational Cognitive indicators to measure the comprehension difficulty.From the perspective of Computational Cognitive Linguistics,we use the aforementioned indicators as the data basis to contrast the There+Be+NP+Loc(structure(1))/Loc+Be+NP(structure(2));Loc+There+V+NP(structure(3))/Loc+V+NP(structure(4));Loc+There+V+NP(Structure(3))/ There+V+NP+Loc(Structure(5))three pairs of synonymous structures from the British National Corpus(BNC)quantitatively and qualitatively.We calculate the MDD,AI,and redundancy of each English existential sentence structure,making statistics to draw the following conclusions:1)By retrieving and analyzing the number and comprehension difficulty of there existential sentences and their synonymous sentence structures in BNC,we find that the number of there existential sentences in BNC(185896)is much more massive than their synonymous sentences’ number(337).At the same time,the information senders tend to choose sentence structures with smaller MDD,smaller AI,and larger redundancy when expressing the meaning of existence.2)The function of there in the existential sentence is to reduce the MDD of the sentence,so the MDD of structures(1)and(3)is smaller structures(3)and(4);’there’ located at the sentence’s beginning can further reduce the MDD,so the MDD of structure(5)is smaller than structure(3),thus reducing the comprehension difficulty for information receivers.’There’ is located at the beginning of a sentence and its AI is minor,which conforms to the simple to complex rules of brain processing and organizing information.As redundant information,there increases the redundancy of the existential sentences,thus diluting the influence of the AI subject NP on the information receivers and reducing the comprehension difficulty.’There’ reduces the impact of noises in the information transmission,and ’there’acts as a buffer to reduce the comprehension difficulty for the information receivers.3)There is a positive correlation between MDD and comprehension difficulty.When the MDD of existential sentences is substantial,other factors are needed to offset the comprehension difficulty caused by the large MDD.As the MDD increases,the AI decreases and the redundancy increases accordingly,which suggests that there is an interaction between the Computational Cognitive indicators to ensure easy comprehension.On the other hand,the influence of AI and redundancy on MDD is significant in all existential sentences.The AI and redundancy limit the MDD to a certain range,thereby reducing the comprehension difficulty.From the last two experiments in this study,our findings are that native speakers prefer to use there existential sentences to express the meaning of existence;Chinese EFL(English as a foreign language)learners prefer to use There+Be+NP+Loc(structure(1))to express the meaning of existence even if the order of the existential sentences in their native language is Loc+Be+NP(structure(2)).These results confirm the conclusions of this study.We examine English existential sentences from the perspective of Computational Cognition,in order to study the construction of English existential sentences quantitatively and explore function of there from different perspectives.We hope this study can arouse readers’ attention and thinking on the cross-linguistic research.