A Study Of English Existential Sentence From The Perspective Of Iconicity

Existential sentence (ES) is a basic sentence pattern occurring in almost all the world languages. However, owing to its special linguistic characteristics, and especially its various representative forms in different languages, ES has caused the concerns of many scholars. They have made a deep research on it, but those studies either neglect the external factors of language by analyzing language only from its internal structure, or have not fully realized the important role of cognition.Emerged in the eighties of the twentieth century, cognitive linguistics is an approach to language formed in the objection against the mainstream generative approach, and is also an approach to language that is based on our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize it. As an important theory in cognitive linguistics, iconicity is of great significance in revealing the mapping relationship between cognition and language structure, and the universality of human thought.Based on the theory of iconicity, this dissertation aims to explain the internal language structure from the external factors by exploring four kinds of mapping relationship between the structure of the English ES and its conceptual structure. The four kinds of mapping relationship, i.e. the principles of iconicity, are: the principle of sequence iconicity, proximity iconicity, quantity iconicity, and asymmetric iconicity. We assume: the sequence of the English ES can be explained by the principle of sequence scope Tai proposes, and it also tallies with the sequence of the information transfer;the distance between the constituents of the English ES is in accordance with the distance of their corresponding concepts;in the proform ES, the occurrence of the specific location is related to the predictability of its concept, and it indicates the importance or unpredictability of the noun phrase that the length of the noun phraseshould be equal to or longer than the length of the verb phrase;the ground-before-figure model of the English ES is contrary to the figure-ground model of natural word order, which reflects that the ground, as the conceptual starting point of the English ES, is the fdcus of cognition, and thus is prominent.On the basis of analyzing the principles of iconicity of the English ES, we can give an explanation for the relationship between the ES and the predicate locative, the relationship between two forms of English ES, and the characteristics of the constituents of the English ES from the perspective of conceptualization processes. For example, the English ES and the predicate locative are iconic but they have different conceptualization processes;the two forms of English ES are iconic but they also have different conceptualization processes;the verbs in the English ES should be intransitive in nature;the noun phrases denote unpredictable, new information;there is meaningful. Then we verify that the English ES is iconic with the conceptual structure in nature though the structures of some English ES superficially violate some principles.In summary, this dissertation endeavors to study three questions: (i) whether language is iconic;(ii) whether the principles of iconicity can be used to explain the structure of the English ES;(iii) whether human thought processes possess universality. Then we can find that iconicity can provide a more reasonable explanation for the formation of the English ES. The study from this perspective can also make us grasp the nature of language, realize the relationship between language and cognition, and understand the universality and variety of the world languages.