A Minimalist Study Of English And Chinese Existential Sentences

Existential Sentences (ES) are a special type of sentences used to indicate the existence, emergence, or disappearance of something or somebody, and can be found in almost all human languages all over the world. Typical English ES begin with an unstressed expletive there, while typical Chinese ES begin with a locative phrase.Since ES relate to a series of theoretical problems thus has caused widely concern from scholars at home and abroad. Many researchers abroad bend themselves to explain the puzzles existing in ES from the perspective of Generative Grammar; while scholars at home primarily focus on describing the special language phenomenon. Nevertheless, as a whole, researchers used to research English and Chinese ES respectively. In the two languages, the commonness that ES involve is ignored.As an important part in cross-language study, in this thesis, we try to explore the syntactic properties on the constituents of EC as well as to derive the different sentence patterns of English and Chinese ES under the framework of MP theory. From derivation, we hope to find the reasons leading to the special properties of these constituents.Firstly, we focus on the core problems concerning ES, namely, the syntactic properties of the expletive there, the subject of ES, the indefinite NP, the existential verbs, and the Case assignment of the postverbal NP. After reviewing the previous studies on ES as well as the research on the derivation of English and Chinese ES, the thesis examines the properties of these constituents again, and promotes our assumptions on them as the basic work to serve our next task in derivation. Finally, we derive different existential sentence patterns from the same fundamental structure by the same operation mechanism under the framework of MP theory.The concrete content is as below:We have proved from evidence that the expletive there (not exist in Chinese ES), the postverbal NP and the LP are arguments of the existential verb, among which the expletive there is the quasi-external argument, the LP is the quasi-internal argument, and the postverbal NP is the real internal argument of the unaccusative verb. All of them originally locate at the argument positions in a vP shell.On the other hand, we have assumed that the split CP layer contains an Ex(istential) Phrase projection between CP and TP, in which Ex works as the Functional Category with uninterpretable [+V] feature, and [+Loc] feature. We also set a fundamental structure which is used to derive the various sentence patterns of English and Chinese ES. Moreover, we accept Schiitze’s (2001) Default Case Approach and assume that the head Ex can assign Default Case to its specifier as the last resort.In derivation, the postverbal NP moves to [Spec, TP] thus can be assigned nominative Case from T in the agreement operation, conversely, T is valued the same φ features (person and number) as on the postverbal NP, which can account for the agreement phenomenon between the postverbal NP and the predicate, as well as can solve the Case assignment of the postverbal NP.Without violating "Burzio’s Generalization"(Burzio1986) that is regarded as a principle of the Universal Grammar, we have successfully derived all patterns of English and Chinese ES under the MP theory. Meanwhile, the success in derivation can prove the legitimacy of our assumptions on the properties of constituents in existential construction, for otherwise, the derivation would have failed. Moreover, the derivation process also can reveal the deep reasons leading to the special properties of the constituents, thus can help people to have a better understanding on English and Chinese ES. Last but not least, our work can give a hand to provide evidence to support Chomsky’s (2001) assumption who claims it is the lexicon diversity that leads to surface differences between languages.