On Existential Sentences In Modern Chinese

This dissertation gives a full and systematic discussion of existential sentence, which is widely used and has distinctive characteristics in the application of Chinese.The dissertation selects the following three novels "Monkey" "Awakes World Marriage Affinity Biography" and "The Scholars" as the main corpus and exhaustively searches the existential sentences among them. Through the comprehensive description and analysis, the dissertation looks forward to displaying the complete picture of the existence constructions in modern Chinese (13-19th). Besides, we make comparisons between existential sentences in modern Chinese and in contemporary Chinese in respect of syntactic features and pragmatic functions.The preamble is a brief introduction to the significance of this study, its scope, guidelines and methodology.On the body of this dissertation, we make classification on existential sentences in modern Chinese first. According to the structure type, we classify the existential sentences into the following three categories: the non-intermediary verb pattern, the intermediary verb pattern and the S-P (Subject-Predicate) predicate pattern of existential sentence. Secondly, this dissertation comprehensively describes the structure, the semantics and pragmatics of the existential sentences in modern Chinese. And in the diachronic level, the modern Chinese (13-19th) existential sentences are compared with the middle-ancient and the contemporary Chinese existential sentences in characteristic respect.The conclusion indicates that 13-19th Chinese existential sentences have laid the foundation for the contemporary Chinese existential sentences in the following aspects: syntax, semantics and pragmatics etc.