Pragmatic Studies On Existence Sentences In Modern Chinese

As a characteristic sentence type, existence sentence has been studied in diversified methods and gets quite a lot of achievements. With the bringing forward of the three-dimensional grammar, pragmatic studies on existence sentence receive more and more attention. However, it is far from enough and leaves rooms for systematic deep research. Under the guidance of three-dimension grammar, basing on concrete language materials, this paper devotes to pragmatic studying on existence sentences.The paper consists of four chapters, foreword and summary as well.The foreword makes an overall review of the studies done in the field concerned, also a brief introduction to the significance of this study, its guidelines and methodology.The first chapter introduces the criterion of differentiating existence sentences, there are seven sentence styles totally as follows: "you (有)" construction, "shi(是)" construction, "Verb + zhe(着)" construction, "Verb + le (了)" construction, "Verb + you (有)" construction, national verb only construction and without verb construction, which share general characters on pragmatic while have individual characters respectively.The second chapter discusses general characters on pragmatic of existence sentences. It contains five parts: topic and statement, coherence and reference in the context, identifiable and indefinable function of the space subject and the existential object, topic starting and continuing function in context and cognitive comprehension. Conclusions are made that existence sentence is typical topic-statement sentence; the space subject has the identifiable tendency while the existential object can be either identifiable or indefinable; existence sentence can be used as beginning, following or ending sentence in the context, and possesses the function of initiating, developing and summarizing the topic respectively; the special sentence structure is influenced by human's cognition, it reflects three principles which are from entirety to portion, range and sequence.The third chapter analyzed individual characters on pragmatic of existence sentences. It is also described from five portions: tense and aspect feature, focus, entailment, omission phenomenon and transferred epithet, the context each sentence style fit for. Generally speaking, the existence represents the particular state of the present situation, but also can be past tense or future tense. The focus of the existence sentence ordinarily lies on existential entity, which called normal focus while sometimes it is contrastive focus in order to emphasize the space location by contrast means. The entailment of the existence sentence links with existential entity and changes with the variation of the focus. The several sentence styles are regularly exist in the same context, but the specific conditions suited for each style are different.The forth chapter surveys the functions and characteristics in different text styles of the existence sentences.