| The existential sentence (ES) is conceived of a ubiquitous phenomenon occurring in almost all human languages (Freeze: 1992). However, due to its perplexing characteristics, such as the indefiniteness of the post-verbal NP, the intransitivity of the verb, etc. it is regarded as one of the most troublesome problems that confuse the scholars concerned.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 reached any feasible and satisfactory results. This dissertation attempts to employ a newly born but promising approach, cognitive linguistics, to the investigation of this issue.The philosophical foundation of cognitive linguistics is Embodied Philosophy, which was put forward by G. Lakoff in 1999. One of its principles is the experiential nature of mind. The categories, concepts, human beings' reasoning and mind do not fully mirror the external world, but are formed through our personal experience, especially through our senses system (Wang Yin, 2005:619).The most fundamental assumption of this innovative approach is to conceive language as an integral facet of cognition. By conceiving language as an integral facet of cognition, cognitive linguists decline to consider grammar as an independent and autonomic system that separates from human being's cognition, psychology and daily life experiences. Instead, they claim that fundamental cognitive abilities and experientially derived cognitive models have direct and pervasive linguistic manifestations, and, conversely, that language structure furnishes important clues concerning basic mental phenomena (Langacker, 1993:1). Cognitive linguistics focuses its study on explaining why some kind of sentences has certain characteristics, not only describing them. The theory of iconicity is one of the most important tools utilized by cognitive linguists to explain linguistic phenomena. According to Haiman, when the external structure of a lingual expression parallels its internal concept construction, it is considered as having a nature of iconicity.The hypothesis of this dissertation is that there exists iconicity between human beings' experience structure and their language structure. Let us explore a person's cognition process when finding there exists or appears something somewhere. For example, when a person is walking near a valley and find "There's someone's singing coming from that valley", he must notice the valley first. Comparatively, as the big and prominent object, the valley is easier to have his attention and becomes the starting point of his cognitive activities. For the time being, there is no non-linguistic proof coming from cognitive psychology to show that Chinese and English nations are really different in perceiving spatial relations. In view of this, we assume that in such situations Chinese and English speakers must have the same cognition process: Location+Verb+Agent, or, from the ground to the figure. Now that Chinese and English speakers have the same cognition process, do they have the same linguistic expression? Through studying Chinese and English ESs, the answer is no. The structure of Chinese language parallels its speakers' cognition process while that of English language does not. In Chinese ESs, the ground is always placed before the figure, which makes Chinese language more iconic. In English ESs, the figure is more often to be placed before the ground, which makes this language less iconic than Chinese.Both Chinese and English ESs can be considered as describing spatial relations to orient things. In There+VP+NP (agent )+PP, the unmarked construction of English ESs, the description is from figure to ground, whereas in the marked construction PP+VP+NP, the description is from ground to figure. There is also something new. The author finds some evidence to prove that the unmarked construction of English ESs is much more frequently used than the marked construction. That is to say, when people use English ESs to describe spatial relations, to a large extent they tend to choose the word order from figure to ground.
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