A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Existential Sentences

Existence is one of the most basic objective realities and phenomena. Existential sentence (ES) is a special type of sentence found in almost all human languages in the world. Since different languages have different formal representations, ES has caused the concerns of many scholars. This thesis takes some theories of contrastive linguistics and cognitive linguistics as the theoretical foundation to study how the existential concepts and existential sentences in both English and Chinese are generated. The thesis tries to give a tentative explanation to the similarities and differences between them.The study shows that the existential concept is that things in the outside world are highlighted onto the background through people's visual perception or the judgment or conclusion made through human brain by experiencing or feeling certain issues or events. The existential concept is mapped into language and generates existential sentences, then respectively generates English and Chinese existential sentences. Owing to the difference in contexts, communicative situations, people's perspectives and cognitive focuses, the same existential concept can be represented in different ways, so both English and Chinese existential sentences are classified into the static and the dynamic.Existential sentence is a special construction in both English and Chinese, which plays an important role in the two languages. This thesis conducts a detailed description and contrast of English and Chinese existential sentences, in the aspects of structure types, existential verbs, subjects, location, NPs as well as the directionality of the sentences, in the hope of bringing out the similarities and differences between them. We discover that Chinese existential sentences are much similar to its English counterpart in terms of structure types as well as noun phrases, while differences mainly exist at the level of subject, location, existential verbs and directionality. The similarities come from the common understanding of things, and there exists iconicity between conceptual structure and linguistic structure. There is commonness in the human mind, for Chinese and English people's cognition process is the same when finding something exists or appears somewhere, while the differences mainly lie in their different philosophical bases and cognitive orientations.By this contrastive study, we can get a full and clear understanding of existential sentences in English and Chinese. These findings are helpful for language teaching and learning.