A Comparative Study On Existential Sentence Between English And Chiese

An existential sentence expresses the meaning of something or somebody existing, appearing or disappearing at some place. The construction of "there be" and "LP+ existential verb+ NP" are the typical existential sentences in English and Chinese respectively. The studies of English existential sentences and Chinese existential sentences are significant for linguists. However, some problems concerning existential sentences still produce discussions, such as the nature of the existential verb, the syntactic place of "there", the generation of CES and so on. For the existing problems, firstly this thesis discusses the nature of existential verbs, whose semantic features are [exist]. The existential verbs exhibit unaccusative properties in nature distributed apparently syntactically. And then the existential sentence is classified according to the type of verb.Secondly, this thesis attempts to explain the generation of CES on the basis of the studies of EES. However, it was found that CES cannot be explained under the mode of EES.Briefly, the main views of this thesis are as follows:(1) Both English existential verbs and Chinese existential verbs exhibit unaccusative property which is not recognized in lexicon, but in the process of morph-syntactic layer. That a lot of unergative verbs and transitive verbs appeared in Chinese existential sentences is a strong proof.(2) The English existential verbs have two internal arguments--- [theme, locative]. "There" in EES is co-indexed with the LP.(3) The theories of generation of EES cannot explain the derivation of CES reasonably. The light verb syntax of Huang will be applied to explain the generation of CES. We propose a light verb "EXIST" exists in the sentence. The light verb is the eventuality of the sentence, which generally choose an NP as its subject, a VP as its complement, then to the layer of the sentence. If the movement ranged from lexical verb to abstract verb "you" happens, the abstract verb "you" will realize as the aspect element "zhe" or "le". The co-appearance of aspect element and Existential verbs depends on the inner characteristics of the verbs.This thesis will first have a comparative study on existential verbs of EES and CES morphologically, and then the generation of EES and CES will be proposed and compared. The similarities and differences of EES and CES are expected to be concluded to make a contribution to comparative linguistics.