| Existential sentence is conceived of a ubiquitous phenomenon occurring in almost all the world languages (Frezz 1992). However, owing to its perplexing characteristics, such as definiteness of the postverbal NP, the unaccusitive of the verb, etc. it is recognized as one of the brain-racking problems that confuses the scholars concerned. To make it more sophisticated, the ES has various representative forms in different languages, for instance, the E-there sentence in English, "you" sentence in Chinese. Historically, three approaches have contributed to the study of this issue, namely, descriptive, generative and functional approaches. But unfortunately, due to their inherent inadequacies, none of them managed to reach any feasible and satisfactory results. This dissertation attempts to employ a newly born but prosperous approach, cognitive-grammatical framework, to the investigation of this issue.Cognitive grammar, initiated by Langacker (1987, 1990, 1991) in the objection against the mainstream generative approach, has distinctive foundations, organizing assumptions and methodological principles. The most fundamental assumption of this innovative approach is to "conceive language as an integral facet of cognition, and grammar as being inherently meaningful" (Asher and Simpson 1994:590). By conceiving language as an integral facet of cognition, cognitive grammar declines to consider grammar as an independent and autonomy system that separated from our cognition, psychology and everyday-life experiences. Instead, it claims that fundamental cognitive abilities and experientially derived cognitive models have direct and pervasive linguistics manifestations, and, conversely, that language structure furnishes important clues concerning basic mental phenomena (Langacker, 1993:1); By reckoning grammar as being inherently meaningful, cognitive grammar maintains that grammar is a symbolic phenomenon with all grammatical elements reasonably attributed some kinds of conceptual import, and that the notion of "imagery" is paramount in the linguistic representations, which defines "our capacity to construe the same conceptual content in alternate ways" (Langacker 1988:63).In accordance with the essential assumptions of cognitive grammar, thisdissertation has been labored to probe the underlying cognitive structures and abilities that have correspondent distributions in our overt linguistic manifestations of existential sentences. The investigation fell into three problems: the unity between ES and predicate locative, the definiteness of the NP in ES and the perform "there" in English ES. As concerning the first problem, the cognitive exploration amazingly revealed a single symbolic structure underlying these two forms of locative expressions, which efficiently explained the unity between these two forms of locative expressions. The slight distinctions were claimed to derive from different distributions of one pair of cognitive structure, trajector and landmark. The second question, why the postverbal NP in ES should be an indefinite one, was adequately responded by integrating the symbolic structure of ES with the cognitive assumptions of definiteness: the trajector of ES, a search domain, is insufficient to determine either the type or the number of the objects within it and to put S (speaker) and H (hearer) upon a unique determined instance of a specific group, so the employment of an indefinite NP is inevitable. The last investigation was successfully accomplished through the revelation of the locative and deictic conceptual imports embodied in "there", which led to the conclusion that E-there functions as a co-index of the prepositional phrase in ES to indicate the hearer's attention to a more specific search domain.To find evidence for the above cognitive-grammatical analyses of ES in Chinese language, the author furthermore developed a case study on a particular Chinese ES-the "you" sentence. The main concern was the unity between two alternatives of "you" sentence that involve possession and exist... |
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