English And Chinese Existential Sentences: A View Of Construction Grammar

Existential sentence, as a corresponding sentence pattern in English and Chinese, is one of the hot issues in language study. And attributed to its special syntactic features and high frequency of use in both English and Chinese, this form of language has attracted much attention and concern in linguistic research. However, some problems in issue are left unclarified.Targeted at some questions unanswered, the thesis studies existential sentences in the framework of Construction Grammar and also furthers to a comparative study between English and Chinese. The paper starts with the identification of the constructional status of existential sentence in the two languages and shows that English and Chinese existential constructions share the same constructional sense, but in different constructional structures. And then, constraints on verbs and postverbal NP instantiated in existential construction in English and Chinese have been analyzed. Existential construction constrains their types of verbs for the construction. Discussions are focused on the semantic features of six types of verbs and the fusion between the verb participant roles and the construction argument roles. It is found that five out of six types of verbs can be used in both English and Chinese existential constructions, but one type of disappearance verbs is excluded from English existential construction because of the cultural differences. Postverbal NPs in both constructions are confined to indefinite NPs. Finally, the paper analyzes and compares the relationships between existential construction and other constructions in their respective language systems. English existential construction has not-pragmatically-synonymous relationship with subject-predicate construction and locative inversion construction. And Chinese existential construction is in the same kind of relationship with subject-predicate construction, locative inversion construction and topicalization construction. In both systems of English existential construction and Chinese existential construction, the nearer the distance between other constructions and existential construction is, the more sense of existence other constructions express and the more similar structures they have. This, to some extent, shows that in a language system constructions with similar constructional structures express similar constructional senses. Moreover, inheritance links, as common relationships among constructions, has great explanatory power for the relationships between existential construction and other constructions in both English and Chinese.The study on existential sentence in Construction Grammar provides theoretical supports not only for better understanding of specificity and cross-linguistic universality of existential construction but also for solving unexplained language phenomena. The study shows that existential construction is in the group of well-studied constructions. And this will shed light on more studies on parallel constructions across-linguistically.