Modern Chinese Existential Sentences Semantic Study

As a rather distinctive sentence structure in modern Chinese, the existential sentence has been shown interest by grammar researchers long ago. Under the guidance of three-dimensional grammar, this paper focuses on semantic research of the existential sentence with the case grammar, collocation theory as well as semantic analysis.This paper first talks over the definition of the existential sentence.Through a discussion upon certain controversial sentence structures like those sentences started with words denoting time or prepositional phrases or part C phrases, and with the presentation of personal opinions, the paper specifies the confines of our discussion.The discussion is followed by a summary of four semantic structural modes, and a detailed analysis of the existential sentence with the indicator "有" or "是", that follows the pattern of "verb+着", that with no indicators and so on. It also further the discussion on the possibilities of substitution between "有" and "是", and "着"and"了" in the existential sentence.Through the comparison between the existential sentence and the fugitive sentence, the final part of the paper centers on analyzing the differences between verbs in these two types of sentence structures while categorizing them according to the different verbs used in specific sentence structures, namely, those that are valid only used in the existential sentence, those that are valid only used in the fugitive sentence, and those that are valid when used in either type of the two sentence structures.