A Contrastive Study On Existential Sentences In English And Chinese-A Cognitive Perspective

This thesis conducts a contrastive study on EES and CES from a cognitive perspective by employing Figure-Ground relation, Image Schema, Bounding Theory, Iconicity and Conceptualization to analyze the features of the structure, agreement and disagreement, as well as directionality of EES and CES. A qualitative and quantitative blended method is adopted in this study. It combines qualitative explanations based on adequate instantiations with quantitative data concerning ES derived from the British National Corpus (BYU-BNC) and Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU (CCL). Besides, the thesis supports the viewpoints with the statistics when necessary. In addition, there also applies some figures, tables and other methods, contrastive verification, for instance.The present research draws the following conclusions:EES and embodies Figure-Ground relation, embodying a Container. EES and its counterpart can not be transformed into each other. The agreement of EES is caused by iconicity, and its exceptions are caused by a shift of perspective from the cognitive domain of physical space to quality space. English nouns bear plural inflections, reflecting Quantitative Iconicity. The verb is required to agree with the noun, reflecting a combination of Quantitative Iconicity and Markedness Iconicity. The conceptualization of existential verbs in EES tends to be rightward and uni-directional and the quantity of verbs that can be used to form EES is greatly reduced.CES has two constructions. The first is of Figure-Ground relation and embodies a Container, stressing an inclusive relationship. The second is the Source-Path-Goal schema, stressing the normal flow of energy. Chinese doesn't bear inflections and verbs don't change forms with nouns. Instead, the quantifiers are employed and have variants, reflecting Quantitative Iconicity to some extent. The conceptualization of existential verbs of CES can be either rightward or leftward and more verbs can be used in CES.Universalities between EES and CES have been identified. 1) the spatial cognitive domain gets primary prominence in asserting existence; they both take the location as Figure and the entity as Ground. 2) both EES and CES can be divided into the prototype and peripheral type. 3) the existential entities in both languages can be bounded or unbounded in terms of physical space, and can be converted into each other.4) the inflectional changes of English nouns reflect Quantitative Iconicity, so do the Chinese quantifiers, but it is not that obvious. 5) the existential verb in Chinese is constrained by the energy flow of [T←ZHE←H], of which the energy flows from the entity to the location and absorbed by the latter; the same situation exists in English. 6) Both EES and CES have the rightward direction. Particularities between EES and CES have also been identified. 1) CES has two types of constructions: the container type and the chain type. While EES is only of Container schema, and EES of the chain type is peripheral. 2) English nouns bear plural inflections, reflecting quantitative iconicity whereas those in Chinese do not despite of the word―men‖, which is not universal. However, Chinese quantifiers meet the needs of quantity representation and reflect Quantitative Iconicity to some extent. 3) the verb in EES is required to agree with the noun, reflecting the combination of Quantitative Iconicity and Markedness Iconicity. But the verb in CES doesn't have such burden. 4) verbs in EES and CES differ in the direction of conceptualization.The significance of the thesis mainly lies in the theoretical aspect:The systematic and in-depth investigation into EES and CES from the cognitive perspective enriches the research methods and cases of EES and CES; the cognitive explanation of EES and CES is more psychologically real and natural compared with the previous ones; and this more psychologically real and natural perspective can, to some degree, be probably extended to the study of other subfields of Chinese.The contrastive study of the universalities and particularities between EES and CES reveals that the hidden cognitive system has an important impact on language, and deepens our knowledge about language nature.Thirdly, this research provides one more solid evidence for the existence of language interface between grammar and meaning.