Toward A Cognitive Study Of The Existential-presentational Construction

Adopting Cognitive Grammar as the framework and working mainly on the basis of an authentic corpus, this dissertation builds a Reference Point-based Action Chain Model to explore the cognitive motivation, grammatical relations, argument structure, aspectual meanings, subjectivity and discursive functions of the existential-presentational construction(hereafter, the E-P construction) in Modern Standard Chinese.Getting to know the location where things exist or (dis)appear is the prerequisite for knowing the world and human survival. Otherwise, people will get lost and can not communicate with each other. Whether motivated by the epstemic and pragmatic need to comprehend the world or by familarity with it, location is the initial or primary focal point that people direct their attention to, and the things that exist or (dis)appear in that location is the secondary focus of human attention. Therefore, location is the trajector, or reference point and is syntactically expressed as the subject and the things are the landmark or the target activated by their location and syntactically represented as the object. The E-P construction iconically embodies the cognitive order to construe location before the things that exist or (dis)appear in their location.The existence or (dis)appearance of any entity is brought about by the transmission of energy which is initiated by the agent and absorbed by the theme via the instrument. The base of the E-P construction is the action chain constituted by the energetic interaction among the agent, the instrument and the theme, and the construction itself profiles the relationship between the locative and the theme which lies at the tail of the action chain.Therefore, the E-P construction has two arguments: the locative and the theme. The E-P constructional meaning is that there exists or (dis)appears something on the location. When the participant of the E-P construction subsumes the semantic roles of both the agent and the theme which can be either the patient, the mover ,the passive experiencer or the zero, the E-P construction profiles the theme and deprofiles or suppresses the agent to maintain its constructional meaning.The E-P construction mainly profiles the state of existence or (dis)appearance of things: the holistic state of the experiential perfect viewed in its entirety and introduced by the aspect marker guo; the final stage and the resultant state of an event marked by le, that is, the perfect of result or the durative state of the imperfective marked by zhe, denoting either the medial stage of an event or the resultant state of an event. The guo-marked E-P sentences are bounded, telic and can accommodate all kinds of verbs. The le-marked E-P sentences are unbounded but telic, and mainly accommodate the achievement, accomplishment and activity verbs and seldom accept state verbs. No matter what kinds of verbs appear in the le-marked E-P sentences, le profiles the final stage and resultant state of an event. The zhe-marked E-P sentences are unbounded and atelic.They mainly accept activity and accomplishment verbs and occasionally accept state verbs, but never accommodate achievement verbs.The E-P construction possesses rich subjectivity. It not only represents the epistemic meaning of the speaker's negation, interrogation, judgement and assumption of the existence or (dis)appearance of something in a location based on his or her visual, auditory, other direct evidences or reported, inferring evidences, and but also expresses the evaluative meaning of the speaker's assessment, surprise, emphasis and wish of what exists or (dis)appears in a certain location.The discursive function of the E-P construction is to introduce into the discourse a new entity that can evoke the subsequent discourse. The E-P construction is linked to its previous discourse or context by its locative which or part of which is evoked by a reference point in the prior discourse or context. Among the seven forms of the E-P constructional locative,the free locational morpheme and pronoun are invoked by a certain reference point in the previous discourse or context. The other forms of locative——noun, noun+locational morpheme, preposition+noun+locational morpheme, verb+noun and the complex form, all contain a noun. And it is the noun that is evoked by a reference point in the previous discourse or context. If the noun is preceded by several noun or pronoun modifiers, the first noun or pronoun modifier is the target that is evoked by a reference point in the prior discourse or context. On the other hand, the theme of the E-P construction serves as a reference point that can invoke the global topic, local topic, discourse participant, setting, cause and so on in the subsequent discourse. Both indefinite nominals and definite nominals can appear in the post-verbal position and evoke the subsequent discourse as long as they contain the hearer-noteworthy information. There does not exist the so-called definiteness effect.By applying the reference point to the analysis of the discursive retrospectiveness and prospectiveness of the E-P construction, this study finds that there are such reference point relationships as the identity, whole and part, part and whole, part and part, possessor and the possessed, set and members, location and things on the location, sound and its producers. The study also finds two more principles of cognitive salience: the audible is more salient than the inaudible and the set is more salient than its members.