A Minimalist Study Of Existential Sentences

Existential sentence has never failed to capture people's attention on account of its peculiar linguistic properties. Scholars abroad and at home have studied it from different perspectives. English existential sentence is a construction of special properties, which consist of the expletive there, an unaccusative predicate verb denoting existence, appearance or disappearance, an indefinite noun phrase( NP) situated in the postverbal position and a prepositional phrase or an adverb indicating location(locative phrase). Syntactic studies on existential sentences focus on the following issues: the case requirement of the expletive there and the relationship between there and the locative phrase (LP); the case assignment of the postverbal NP and the derivation of existential sentences. Chinese existential sentence has long been a'hot'field of research among Chinese grammarians, traditional grammarians and generative linguists alike. They have given an in-depth and comprehensive description of every element in this interesting type of sentences: its classification, the predicate verb, and the postverbal entity, etc.This thesis focuses on the study of the semantic and syntactic properties of English and Chinese existential sentences, and explains the generation of English and Chinese existential sentences in the Minimalist Program (MP). First,we will introduces the definitions of English and Chinese existential sentences, and then reviews the theoretical and empirical research literature relevant to this study within the framework of Minimalist Program (MP). Empirical studies are made in chapter 3 and chapter 4, in which existential sentences in English and Chinese are touched upon. Chapter 3 mainly discussed the expletive there, subjecthood of postverbal NP, and derivation of English existential sentences. Chapter 4 analyzes Chinese existential verbs, the classification problem, and discusses the subject-object problem in the Chinese existential sentences and derivation of Chinese existential sentences.